Interactive Configuration Management for Distributed Object Systems

This paper describes an environment for interactive configuration management of the software components comprising a distributed enterprise application. The environment permits one or more managers to view and modify the structure of components in terms of component instances, their allocation to hardware nodes and the bindings between their interfaces. Our graphical management is based upon the Darwin configuration language which can be used to create the initial system. It supports hierarchical composition of CORBA components to form a composite distributed application or service. When this structure has been modified interactively, a persistent specification of the configuration can be saved to backing store. This can be used to determine unreachable or failed components and, if necessary, to recreate them. The configuration management environment is integrated into an overall domain-oriented platform for enterprise management. The paper illustrates the use of the management system in terms of a simple banking example, and outlines our implementation based on a CORBA platform.