xVM Ops Center at Supercomputing

Last month, Sun was a sponsor of the International Super Computing Conference (ISCC) in Germany, and the Ops Center team was there to show off the latest in how Ops Center can be used in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.  Prasad Pai is our own HPC rockstar who has been responsible for major super computing installations like TACC, KISTI, and Clemson choosing Ops Center as part of their infrastructure.

Prasad was on hand to show off how Ops Center can be best used in these kinds of environments.  In particular, Ops Center's scalability and agentless hardware monitoring make it a great choice for these kinds of environments.  Below you can see a picture of Prasad demonstrating Ops Center at the conference.

Over the past couple of months, we've been upgrading customers from older Ops Center version to the newest available 2.1 version -- TACC just recently upgraded to 2.1.  However, there's even more coming in 2.5 that HPC customers will like.  In particular, because today's supercomputers use so many nodes, scalability is really important.  To that end, we've built a 1,000 node cluster (nicknamed Nessie) of older hardware that we can use for internal scalability testing.  Because Nessie is dedicated to the task, we can really abuse it in ways we wouldn't do to our customer's production (or even pre-production systems).  With this ability to try extreme use-cases we've been able to dramatically increase performance at large scale.  I'll plan to post a few stats about our performance work here soon.

Posted at 05:00AM Jul 23, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  | 

New Smart Goups Feature in Ops Center 2.5

We've reached some key, internal development milestones for Ops Center 2.5 so I thought it was a good occasion to share more key bits of what's coming in this next release.  One small, but very cool feature is called Smart Groups.  Ops Center has always offered the ability to create arbitrary groupings of assets, and it still does.  However, it now offers the ability to use several pre-fabricated Smart Groups that act a queries against the data model and create automatic associations.  It's not rocket science, but it is incredibly convenient!

Let me show you how it works.  These are some screen shots I took off of a development systems this morning.  When you open Ops Center 2.5, much of it looks familiar, but there are some key changes.  One of them is in the left-hand side nav bar.  In particular, there is now a drop down menu that allows you to select different filters.  In the screenshot below, it's set to the default "All Assets" filter (which is pretty much the only filter there was in 2.5).  Note these assets are a collection of hardware, operating systems, and virtual machines (both SPARC and x86).

Now, if you click on that drop down, you'll see all the pre-built filters that are now available.  These filters allow you to quick select custom views depending on the kinds of operations you want to do.  They also provide you quick access to heterogeneous groups -- which means you can take common actions across the group. 

Below you'll see the screen you get when you select the Operating Systems view.  You'll note it includes automatically built sub-groups for each major OS.  This makes it easy to do something like run a security compliance report against all your RedHat systems.  Also, the inspector in the center pain now shows summary information for the group -- like top CPU and memory using systems.  This can help you quickly identify a server that may be in trouble.

And lastly, here you can see the quick breakdown that comes from the Systems filter.  This shows you all the servers, and breaks them down by different processor types.  Need to do a firmware check against all your SPARC systems?  Easy!  Need to do an emergency power down on your whole data center?  Easy!

While none of this is really complicated, it's sure to make admin's lives easier -- and that is Ops Center's main job.  In the next few days, I'll post a few other cool bits coming in 2.5.  One final note: as part of this re-organization we've dropped the term Gear from the interface.  It seems some people found this term to be either confusing or even distasteful.  We've generally moved to using the term Asset.  Let me know here if you like or dislike the change (if you have an opinion)!

Posted at 05:00AM Jul 22, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

Recent 2.1 Docs Updates

The writers have been busy lately adding new items to the docs set for Ops Center, and I wanted to call attention to three recent additions that have been featured over at the xVM Blog.

Ops Center 2.1 Quick Start Guides - Your fastest way to get up and running

Highly Available Ops Center Controllers - How to build a stand-by controller, so your Ops Center is always up

Working with Windows - How to use Ops Center 2.1 to monitor Windows instances (bare metal or virtualized)

Please go check them out!

It's going to be a busy few weeks here.  We're coming up on feature freeze for Ops Center 2.5 (which will be our best release yet).  Be sure to stay tuned for more news on that in the coming days.

Posted at 08:56AM Jul 13, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

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  | 

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  | 

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]

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]

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]

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]

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  |