Launching service applications using a virtual network management system

摘要

A network service administration system including a plurality of service objects, a plurality of address objects; and a service configuration application for a multifunction appliance running on a client computer coupled to the appliance via a network. The service configuration application includes an interface allowing subscribers to configure at least a subset of application content services provided by the appliance and including a rule set implementing rules in ones of said application content services in said subset based on changes to configurations of any other of said application content services. Each of said service objects may comprise an individual network service definition.

主权项

1. A method for configuring a data center that has a plurality of geographically distributed facilities that provide network services to a plurality of different company subscribers, the method comprising:
executing applications for the subscribers on a plurality of subscriber-specific application servers distributed throughout the data center, executing, on a centralized virtualized system within the data center, a plurality of services applications to provide the network services for the subscribers, each of the service applications associated with a respective one of the subscribers and configured to process packets for the respective one of the subscribers; presenting, with the network management system, a user interface via a computer network,
wherein the user interface presents a hierarchy of topology objects that represents a virtual topology of the data center for an individual one of the company subscribers,wherein the user interface present a filtered view of the topology objects that presents, in a hierarchical layout, only a portion of configuration data that is used by the data center for providing network services to the individual company subscriber,wherein the portion of the topology objects presented by the filtered view of the user interface comprises:a global data center object that represents the data center,a set of service objects that represent the network services that are provided by the data center to the respective individual company subscribers by the centralized virtualized system,a set of device objects that represent the physical application servers for the respective subscriber within the data center, anda set of facility objects that represent the distributed facilities of the data center; responsive to input from the user interface, automatically launching and executing a new service application for one of the subscribers within the centralized virtualized system in accordance with the virtual topology, wherein executing the new service application in accordance with the virtual topology comprises automatically executing the new service application within a subscriber context of one of the service topology objects by using, with the new service application, data associated with the one of the service topology objects for the respective one of the subscribers and data associated with any of the topology objects within the hierarchy of topology objects that are subordinate to the one of the service topology objects.