|
|
|
Monday Jun 15, 2009
Managing Fiber Channel LUNs with Ops Center 2.5
One of the coolest parts of Ops Center's virtualization management features is Storage Libraries. In Ops Center 2.1 storage libraries are based on NAS (either NFS or CIFS). However, in Ops Center 2.5 we're adding support for LDOMs (as previously discussed) and LDOMs really like to have their guests hosted on SAN storage. Thus, in Ops Center 2.5 we're adding the ability to create a Storage Library as a collection of LUNs. This is going to be really powerful for large deployments. Here are just a couple of screenshots to give you a taste for how this works.
Posted at 10:31AM Jun 15, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[0]
Wednesday Jun 10, 2009
Cool Charts in Ops Center 2.5
One of the small, but cool improvements coming in 2.5 is a more flexible charting framework to view historical data (like CPU, Memory and Network utilization). The framework now allows you to better specify intervals, chart types, and to easily export the data. Here's a quick snapshot to give you a taste.
Posted at 08:49AM Jun 10, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter | Comments[0]
Friday Jun 05, 2009
Speeding Deployment of xVM Ops Center
Deploying a new data center management system isn't usually easy, but it doesn't have to be that hard. As part of my on-going previews of xVM Ops Center 2.5, I wanted to show you some of the work we're doing to make it much easier. When we release Ops Center 2.0, we did a major overhaul of the installer to make it much easier and faster. However, even after installing the software for the Enterprise Controller, doing a useful deployment including the Controller, Proxies and Agents still takes some real know-how. In order to help, we created check-lists and other helper tools. However, it required instruction and left room for human error. Thus, as part of the 2.5 release we're adding a new set of built-in deployment tools that take you through a step-by-step process to get up and running quickly. Take a look below. First, the wizard introduces you to the process through which you'll be going.
Next the Wizard shows you how all the components fit together.
And, here's where it gets interesting. The old manual check-lists are now automated! Check out the step below where all the checks for hardware and network resources are done automatically.
There's actually a several more steps where it walks you through the set up, but I'll show you just one of them below. Here you get to select the typc of deployment you want to do and then the wizard will customize itself to that scenario and walk you through.
It's my personal goal for the next year to move from hundreds of individual Ops Center deployments to thousands of deployments. This kind of technology will really help accelerate that rate. Posted at 05:00AM Jun 05, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[1]
Wednesday Jun 03, 2009
Managing Virtual Machines on SPARC
Over the past couple of weeks I've described some features of the forthcoming xVM Ops Center 2.5 release including improved Windows and Container management. Well, here's another feature that people should find exciting: managing SPARC virtual machines via the Logical Domains (LDOMS) hypervisor. Ops Center 2.5 will for the first time unify the management of SPARC Virtual Machines, x86 Virtual Machines and Solaris Containers (on x86 or SPARC!). Below is a sample screenshot from the new UI. You'll notice it looks very similar to the previous Container pictures I've posted (and these look similar to the xVM Server management screens I've shown before). This new release of Ops Center will truely unify Sun's virtualization portfolio.
Posted at 10:25AM Jun 03, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[3]
Thursday May 28, 2009
Managing Solaris Containers with xVM Ops Center
Solaris Containers (sometimes also called Zones) are today the most popular way to virtualize Solaris. I've talked to customers everywhere that use them. In the current version of Ops Center we have a number of ways to make your life easier when administering Containers. In fact, BigAdmin has a great article that covers this in-depth. It's surely worth a read. Below is a screenshot I took today on my Ops Center 2.1 test rig that includes a pair of Solaris Containers (you can see them as children in the main "gear" tree below the main OS instanced (aka the Global Zone).
When you select one of the Containers you can see an inspector like the one below (this is just a sub-set of the info we can display).
However, there's been a key limitation in our Container management story to date with Ops Center. The creation of a new container hasn't been tightly managed. We've been able to provision multiple containers with a bare-metal OS, but the dyanamic lifecycle management of Containers hasn't been available. That's all changing in the upcoming version 2.5 release. Below is a snapshot of the wizard that you use to create a new Container. It's looks very similar (by design!) to the wizard you use to create a new x86 VM inside xVM Server or a new SPARC VM inside the Logical Domains hypervisor (more on that next week).
With this capability, we will have full lifecycle management for Solaris containers inside Ops Center. And, this includes management of the virtual networks and storage for the Containers (a complicated bit of administration to be sure!). Best of all, it's integrated with Ops Center's existing capabilities like patching and hardware management. Posted at 01:09PM May 28, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter | Comments[3]
Tuesday May 26, 2009
xVM Ops Center 2.5
It's been about a month since we shipped Ops Center 2.1. The field teams are in full swing rolling it out at new customers, but the engineering teams are all heads down working on new features for Ops Center 2.5! It's a busy time to be sure, but I thought I'd take some time over the next few days to give you all a sneak peak of some of the new things coming in 2.5 -- which is due the second-half of this Summer. The first one I thought I'd give you a peak at is Windows update management. One of the key features for Ops Center has always been it's advanced support for patching Solaris and Linux systems. However, we haven't been able to help people with Windows. Well, in Ops Center 2.5 we're adding support for patching of Windows -- giving users a "single pane of glass" to manage Solaris, Linux and Windows patching. Here's a screen shot just to whet your appetitie! Keep an eye out for more previews of 2.5 features here. More previews to come soon! Posted at 11:29AM May 26, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[6]
Tuesday May 19, 2009
xVM Ops Center Screencasts Lately there have been a number of cool screencast-style videos produced about xVM Ops Center. Here's a link to two of them that should be of interest. First, here's a link to a great overview of the Ops Center user interface. Click here to see the UI overview. Next, is a new screencast that shows how to integrated Ops Center with legacy hardware utilizing the Halcyon integration features. Click here to see the Halcyon screencast. I really love the work Halcyon is doing. They're providing major customer value with their integration packages for xVM Ops Center. Posted at 02:11PM May 19, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter | Comments[0]
Thursday May 07, 2009
Free xVM Ops Center 2.0 Training
Sun Learning Services has just released a free online training class on xVM Ops Center 2.0 (we're working on a 2.1 update now). If you're just getting started with Ops Center, then this is a great resource. Here's the course outline: Module 1 - Sun xVM Ops Center Overview
Module 2 - Sun xVM Ops Center Architecture
Module 3 - Sun xVM Ops Center Implementation, Gear Discovery and Administration
To check out the training, just click here. Posted at 11:30AM May 07, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter | Comments[1]
Tuesday May 05, 2009
Integrating xVM Ops Center Into Your Datacenter
I often get asked by customers about how they can integrate xVM Ops Center into an existing infrastructure that includes a monitoring framework like IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView. For quite a while, my answer was that this was quite possible using the Ops Center WS-MAN API set. However, it's recently gotten even easier. Our partner Halcyon recently released a prepackaged integration between Ops Center 2 and a number of popular frameworks. Owen recently covered this in-depth over on his blog (screen shots included!). Go on over and take a look. Posted at 05:00AM May 05, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization |
Monday May 04, 2009
"Free" Hypervisor Options
Since my last post where I described that the xVM Server product is being bundled into xVM Ops Center, I got a lot of questions about whether this means there's no truly open source option for hypervisors from Sun. Of course, first there is VirtualBox. There have been over 10,000,000 downloads of VirtualBox and it keeps getting better and better. However, lots of people are clearly interested in a type-1, bare-metal hypervisor that supports features like multi-CPU guests and migration. One great option for people that want a completely open source type-1 hypervisor is the xVM hypervisor that's included in every copy of OpenSolaris. This is the same hypervisor that's at the core of xVM Server, but it's exposed as a feature of the OS instead of as a managed appliance -- all the same base capabilities are there. It can be a little tricky to get started with xVM hypervisor if you don't have exposure to this style of product. However, Paul Telles recently put up a couple of blog entries that show everything you need in order to get the hypervisor installed at get your first Windows VM running inside: Check it out! Posted at 05:00AM May 04, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[9] |
|
|||
