Method and apparatus for controlling an extensible computing system

DETAILED DESCRIPTION According to one aspect of the invention, the foregoing needs, and other needs and that will become apparent from the following description, are achieved by a method and apparatus for controlling and managing a highly scalable, highly available and secure data processing sites, based on a wide scale computing fabric ("computing grid").
The computing grid is physically constructed once, and then logically divided up for various organizations on demand.
The computing grid comprises a large plurality of computing elements that are coupled to one or more VLAN switches and to one or more storage area network (SAN) switches.
A plurality of storage devices are coupled to the SAN switches and may be selectively coupled to one or more of the computing elements through appropriate switching logic and commands.
One port of the VLAN switch is coupled to an external network, such as the Internet.
A supervisory mechanism, layer, machine or process is coupled to the VLAN switches and SAN switches.
Initially, all storage devices and computing elements are assigned to Idle Pools.
Under program control, the supervisory mechanism dynamically configures the VLAN switches and SAN switches to couple their ports to one or more computing elements and storage devices.
As a result, such elements and devices are logically removed from the Idle Pools and become part of one or more virtual server farms (VSFs) or instant data centers (IDCs).
Each VSF computing element is pointed to or otherwise associated with a storage device that contains a boot image usable by the computing element for bootstrap operation and production execution.
According to one aspect of the invention, the supervisory layer is a control plane comprised of a control mechanism hierarchy that includes one or more master control process mechanisms communicatively coupled to one or more slave control process mechanisms.
The one or more master control process mechanisms allocate and de-allocate slave control process mechanisms based upon slave control process mechanism loading