Features
Stateless Experience
The Image Streamer appliance permits a truly stateless experience for deployment of operating systems on HPE Synergy
compute modules. The operating systems are hosted in Image Streamer and run on the compute modules. To achieve
statelessness, the software state of the compute module and the deployed state of the OS volume are maintained
separately. The software state contains the firmware configuration, network connections, boot settings and the iLO
configuration, and is stored in the server profiles available in HPE OneView. The deployed OS volume contains the Golden
Image (a combination of a bootable operating system, applications, and I/O driver version) and personality (hostname, IP
configuration), and is stored in the Image Streamer OS volume. The servers do not have any storage for application data.
These compute modules boot from the OS volumes stored in the Image Streamer appliance. This stateless server
experience helps achieve faster deployment of operating systems.
NOTE: If you choose to use persistent local storage, the Image Streamer appliance cannot provide stateless compute
modules. You can use a temporary local storage such as swap space with a stateless approach.
High Availability
The Image Streamer appliance works in pairs to achieve high availability. Additionally, multiple pairs of the appliance can
be accommodated in a single HPE Synergy Composer domain to enhance the scalability of this appliance. If both the
active and standby appliances of the primary appliance pair fail, a secondary appliance is designated as the new primary
pair.
The storage on the appliance forms an Active-Active cluster. This mode helps in ensuring continuity in serving OS
volumes if an active appliance fails.
For an Image Streamer appliance pair, the artifact management and OS deployment function is served by an Active-
Standby management cluster, whereas the OS volume storage is served by an Active-Active Storage cluster.
More information
Image Streamer appliance terminology
High availability for OS volumes
The Image Streamer appliance uses a virtual storage appliance to provide an Active-Active storage cluster for the
compute modules. This Active-Active cluster uses an active-standby data path for the OS volumes that achieves high
availability of OS volumes. The Image Streamer appliance uses alerts to notify the user, when any of the storage nodes in
the cluster is not available.
High availability for appliance and artifact management
An HPE Synergy Composer domain can have multiple Image Streamer appliance pairs. An Image Streamer appliance pair
serves a single logical enclosure, and a single logical enclosure can have at most one Image Streamer appliance pair. One
of the Image Streamer appliance pair is designated as the primary appliance, and all other appliance pairs are designated
as secondary appliances.
An Image Streamer appliance works as an Active-Standby appliance pair to achieve high-availability for appliance and
artifact management through the user interface. If an active appliance fails, the standby appliance in the appliance pair
can take over the user interface and artifact management in less than 3 minutes. If both the active and standby appliances
of the primary appliance fail, one of the available secondary appliances must be designated as the new primary appliance.
To view the details of active and standby appliances in an appliance pair, navigate to the
Deployment Appliances page
on the Image Streamer user interface.
The Image Streamer appliance uses alerts to notify the user when the appliance is not highly available.
Features
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