Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network (e.g., the Internet). Cloud computing provided at various data centers.
This type of data center environment allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with easier manageability and less maintenance, and enables information technology (IT) departments to more rapidly adjust IT resources (such as servers, storage, and networking) to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.
In Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a basic cloud service model, the cloud providers offer to enterprises computers, as physical or more often as virtual machines, raw (block) storage, firewalls, load balancers, and networks. IaaS providers supply these resources to the enterprises, on demand, from their large pools installed in the data centers.
Cloud computing services are typically provided from remote data centers and they are accessed using the Internet. For an individual user (which may, for example, be an employee of an enterprise or a system operated by the enterprise), only one data center is involved at a time. However, in certain situations, e.g., to support applications with tight delay requirements or systems with limitations as to how they can be deployed, it may not be enough to rely on cloud resources or services provided by a single data center.
Thus, there are situations when two or more data centers are providing (simultaneously or not) the cloud resources to a single user or system. For these situations, there is a need to coordinate the configurations of those resources across the data centers. One example is when virtual machines with virtual network interfaces (vNICs) are deployed in different data centers and are interconnected, for example, with layer 2 services like virtual private Lan service (VPLS). The MAC addresses assigned to the vNICs need to be coordinated to avoid collisions. The MAC address is considered to be a parameter that needs to be coordinated across the data centers that provide the computing services. Similar collisions may arise for other parameters associated with other types of virtual resources or services.
Thus, there is a need to develop a mechanism or a method that coordinates these parameters across plural data centers for those services offered to a given user. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods that avoid the afore-described problems and drawbacks.