wiki:ProductionRelease

Version 1 (modified by hdempsey@bbn.com, 11 years ago) (diff)

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GENI Production Rack Release Procedure

Background

All GENI racks are built and installed by a distributed rack team. There are currently two rack teams: InstaGENI (HP Labs, Northwestern University Princeton, and University of Utah) and ExoGENI (IBM, Duke Universtiy, RENCI). Additional software for all GENI racks comes from the Open Networking Foundation https://www.opennetworking.org/. Indiana University provides a GENI operations help desk and shared GENI operations monitoring for all GENI racks via the GMOC http://gmoc.grnoc.iu.edu/. Staff at RENCI and the University of Utah also provide additional operations and monitoring support for their team's racks. Site contacts at each rack location provide local support and engineering for their racks, and work with their colleagues in GENI as needed on event resolution and GENI-wide planning and integration. (Note: All GENI rack teams complete GENI Acceptance Testing with the GPO before they start fielding racks at GENI sites.)

The GPO coordinates GENI rack integration with the rack teams and site contacts, using the high-level GENI rack checklist http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GENIRacksHome/RacksChecklist. When a particular rack makes it through the checklist, it is ready to be released as a production GENI resource. Note that the local site contact for each rack does their own testing with the rack and confirms that they are ready to support users as part of the high-level checklist.

At any point in GENI, there are always new features in development. The rack integration and release procedures only cover production GENI capabilities, which are verified as part of each site's confirmation tests (http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GENIRacksHome/ExogeniRacks/SiteConfirmationTests and http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GENIRacksHome/InstageniRacks/SiteConfirmationTests). Certain racks may be configured to support early integration or trials of new features, but those features are not required for the rack to be released. Neither should testing those features make the racks unavailable to experimenters for an extended period.

The racks at BBN, RENCI, the University of Utah, and Princeton all support experimenters, but are also used for early development and integration of new features. Scheduled maintenance and upgrades are likely to be more frequent for these racks than for other GENI racks, which may be relevant to some experimenters.

The rest of this page describes the GPO procedure for releasing a rack to production.

Production Release Procedure

  1. When a new GENI rack has been installed, integrated, and tested, the GPO will create a request ticket with the rack's common name to transition the rack resources to production. (Development teams who would like to receive these notifications should email their request to help@geni.net.)
  1. Software developers who want to support production resources configure their systems to list the new production rack. This includes at least the GENI portal, OMNI (in the GCF), and GPO-configured monitoring displays.
  1. When the required configuration updates to the portal, OMNI, and GPO-configured monitoring have been made, the GPO will update ProductionResources with the new rack information.
  1. The GPO will email the dev@geni.net and experimenters@geni.net mailing lists to announce the new rack.
  1. The GPO will close the production release ticket. Note that there may be some delay before a released rack is included in all tools, due to the timing of different software releases.