Present day servers must support a variety of legacy I/O devices and protocols that are rarely used in the day server operation, at significant costs in board layout complexity, reliability, power consumption, heat dissipation, and ease of management. We present a design of an IP Only Server, which has a single, unified I/O interface: IP network. All of the server's I/O is emulated and redirected over IP/Ethernet to a remote management station, except for the hard disks which are accessed via iSCSI. The emulation is done in hardware, and is available from power-on to shutdown, including the pre-OS and post-OS (crash) stages, unlike alternative solutions such as VNC which can only function when the OS is operational. The server's software stack - the BIOS, the OS, and applications - will run without an modifications.
We have developed a prototype IP Only Server, based on a COTS FPGA running our embedded I/O emulation firmware. The remote station is a commodity PC running a VNC client for video, keyboard and mouse. Initial performance evaluations with unmodified BIOS and Windows and Linux operating systems indicate negligible network overhead and acceptable user experience. This prototype is the first attempt to create a diskless and headless x86 server that runs unmodified industry standard software (BIOS, OS, and applications).
By: Muli Ben-Yehuda; Oleg Goldshmidt; Elliot K. Kolodner; Zorik Machulsky; Vadim Makhervaks; Julian Satran; Marc Segal; Leah Shalev; Ilan Shimony
Published in: H-0246 in 2006
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:
This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.
Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .