Managing heterogeneous systems

[Richard Hanley]

Hi Neeraj,

This is an open question that I've been looking into as well.

For BMC to BMC communication there are a few options.

   1. If you have network connectivity you can communicate using Redfish.
   2. If you only have a PCIe connection, you'll have to use either the
   inband connection or the side band I2C*.  PLDM and MCTP are protocols that
   defined to handle this use case, although I'm not sure if the OpenBMC
   implementations have been used in production.
   3. There is always IPMI, which has its own pros/cons.

For taking several BMCs and aggregating them into a single logical
interface that is exposed to the outside world, there are a few things
happening on that front.  DMTF has been working on an aggregation protocol
for Redfish.  However, it's my understanding that their proposal is more
directed at the client level, as opposed to within a single "system".

I just recently joined the community, but I've been thinking about how a
proxy layer could merge two Redfish services together.  Since Redfish is
fairly strongly typed and has a well defined mechanism for OEM extensions,
this should be pretty generally applicable.  I am planning on having a
white paper on the issue sometime after the holidays.

Another thing to note, recently DMTF released a spec for running a binary
Redfish over PLDM called RDE.  That might be a useful way of tying all
these concepts together.

I'd be curious about your thoughts and use cases here.  Would either PLDM
or Redfish fit your use case?

Regards,
Richard

*I've heard of some proposals that run a network interface over PCIe.  I
don't know enough about PCIe to know if this is a good idea.

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 1:27 PM Neeraj Ladkani <neladk at microsoft.com> wrote:

> Are there any standards in managing heterogeneous systems? For example in
> a rack if there is a compute node( with its own BMC) and storage node( with
> its own BMC) connected using a PCIe switch.  How these two BMC represented
> as one system ?  are there any standards for BMC – BMC communication?
>
>
>
>
>
> Neeraj
>
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