Virtualization in network and servers infrastructure to support dynamic system reconfiguration in ALMA

摘要

ALMA is the first astronomical project being constructed and operated under industrial approach due to the huge amountof elements involved. In order to achieve the maximum through put during the engineering and scientific commissioningphase, several production lines have been established to work in parallel. This decision required modification in theoriginal system architecture in which all the elements are controlled and operated within a unique Standard TestEnvironment (STE). The advance in the network industry and together with the maturity of virtualization paradigmallows us to provide a solution which can replicate the STE infrastructure without changing their network addressdefinition. This is only possible with Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) and Virtual LAN (VLAN) concepts. Thesolution allows dynamic reconfiguration of antennas and other hardware across the production lines with minimum timeand zero human intervention in the cabling. We also push the virtualization even further, classical rack mount servers arebeing replaced and consolidated by blade servers. On top of them virtualized server are centrally administrated withVMWare ESX. Hardware costs and system administration effort will be reduced considerably. This mechanism has beenestablished and operated successfully during the last two years. This experience gave us confident to propose a solutionto divide the main operation array into subarrays using the same concept which will introduce huge flexibility andefficiency for ALMA operation and eventually may simplify the complexity of ALMA core observing software sincethere will be no need to deal with subarrays complexity at software level.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.