Ops Center Wraps Up Open World

Well, Oracle Open World has wrapped up.  It was (in the immortal words of Bill & Ted) Most Excellent!  The show was truly massive, spilling out of Moscone Center and onto Howard street (see pic below).

Of course, Ops Center had a demo area where we got to show of the new 2.5 release to tons of interested customers.  Here you can see Steve Stelting (Ops Center engineer) demoing the new stuff.

Also, Mike Wookey and Tony Tomarchio did a great presentation on Ops Center 2.5.  You can download a PDF of their slides here.  Too bad we didn't get to record all the demos (they took up much of the session), but you can see lots of demos here. 

Of course there were other surprises too.  A visit from the Governator and the Toxic Twins put a real cap on the experience! 

Posted at 10:30AM Oct 16, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |  Comments[3]

Planning for Oracle Open World

I'm starting to plan for Oracle Open World, which starts this Sunday.  I find that I'm actually getting kind of excited.  With JavaOne (Sun's biggest show) I always know what to expect, and I pretty much knew all about the technologies that interested me.  This is not so with Oracle Open World.  It's massive, and there is so much new stuff to learn!

I spent part of the day yesterday scouring the program to find all the sessions that interested me.  There were really too many to possibly attend (several times there were two sessions at exactly the same time I wanted to attend).  Below you'll find my personal list of sessions I'm going to try to go to.  I may try to hit a few more, and may miss some of these, but this is my personal target this.  I hope to see some of you at these too.  It should be a blast.

Posted at 05:00AM Oct 06, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

Platespin and Ops Center

Platespin is one of the companies that most effectively rode the first wave of virtualization mania.  It became the most popular Physical to Virtual (p2v) solution for VMware and has since branched out from there into other areas.  Then, last year Platespin was acquired by Novell.  Platespin continues to operate as a fairly autonomous division of Novell and to be hugely popular.

Back in July of this year, it was announced that Platespin's flagship product Migrate would support automated p2v migrations for bare metal Solaris 10 instances into Solaris Containers.  This is a huge boon to Solaris customers interested in consolidating multiple, older hardware systems onto a more modern Sun server.  Now they can p2v their Solaris workloads using exactly the same well-loved user interface they use to consolidate Windows and Linux work-loads onto VMware.

The timing of this release from Platespin couldn't have been better for Ops Center customers.  We've been certifying our recently announced Solaris Container management capabilities with Containers created by Platespin, and are really excited about the potential.  Just to give you a taste of what the combination can do I've put two screenshots below.  The first shows the Platespin interface migrating a system into a Container.  The second shows Ops Center managing the zone after discovering it and adding to it's managed asset list.

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

The Upgraded Ops Center Info Exchange

As we've upgraded Ops Center, our Information Exchange for docs and training has also been upgraded.  The info exchange includes links to training and docs.  Click on the image below to check it out.

Posted at 11:29AM Oct 01, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

Bridging Ops Center and Oracle Enterprise Manager

Yesterday's big announcement was Ops Center 2.5's availability.  However, at the end of the press release, there was a short paragraph about how we plan to demo at Oracle Open World some new technology to connect Sun's and Oracle's systems management tools.  This technology isn't ready for production yet, but it is far enough along to help demonstrate how valuable Ops Center can be to customers using Oracle.

At Open World we'll be showing the first phase of the Ops Center to Enterprise Manager bridge.  In this phase of the project, we've built a plug-in to Enterprise Manager that allows Enterprise Manager to pull detailed hardware information from Ops Center up into Enterprise Manager.  Why is this interesting?  Because now customers using both EM and OC will be able to correlate information from higher levels of the system (like database and middleware stats) to lower level information (like hardware performance counters and component failures).  Here's a screenshot that shows some of this detailed hardware information displayed inside Enterprise Manager.

This is just the begining.  Longer term we'll start to pass information in both directions and do more complex linking between the products.  It should offer us a very powerful solution for customers of both products.

Posted at 10:27AM Sep 30, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |  Comments[3]

Power is Money

One of the coolest new features in Ops Center is the ability to monitor power utilization over time, per server.  Mike Barrett from the Ops Center marketing team just sent me some really cool stuff he's been developing using this capability.  In particular, he's figured out how to easily export kilowatt hours into a simple format that can be use for some simple calculations to figure out the annual power cost for a server.  Below is an example where Mike has computed his annual power cost for a new Sun x4150 is about $270.

This is really just a start with what you can do with this capability, but it's also something that shows us direction for the future.  People are getting more and more interesting in this kind of capability so we'll providing more and more features like this built into Ops Center.

Posted at 05:00AM Sep 16, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

New Tree Search Feature in Ops Center 2.5

Here is another small, but very useful addition to the user interface in Ops Center 2.5.  In this release, the team has put a lot of emphasis on scale.  The first problem you see when working with very large numbers of assets is just finding what you're looking for.  In a previous entry I talked about smart groups that allow for automatic categorization.  Now, we've added another feature.  This time in addition to grouping, you can search the asset tree for any string.  And, it works with Smart Groups, so you can filter on a group and then search within it.  Take a look below at these two screenshots.  At the top you can select your Smart Group filter and near the bottom you can enter your search term.

Posted at 08:58AM Aug 12, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

The New Jobs Drawer in Ops Center 2.5

Because Ops Center is designed to manage thousands of servers, we designed it differently than other, more traditional management systems.  In particular, the core of the Ops Center Controller is a giant job queuing systems.  Almost no actions in Ops Center are synchronous.  When the user requests an action, a job is created and queued for execution.  Then the job is picked up by a Proxy for execution against a group of managed Servers or OSs.  Because this is all asynchronous, jobs can be queued against thousands of systems and executed in an orderly manner -- without blocking the user interface until they complete.

However, with all these jobs starting and completing on different schedules, it requires that Ops Center do a really good job of explaining to the user the state of the world.  What jobs are processing?  What has completed?  Did anything fail?  Thus, in Ops Center 2.5, we've redesigned the user experience for accessing the job manager status to be even easier.  In version 2.0 and 2.1, there was a section in the left-nav that took you to a dedicated screen to access job info.  Now it's available all the time.

Take a look at the screenshot below.  At the bottom-left corner of the screen is the word "Jobs" followed by a set of icons and numbers.  This shows you the current status of the job manager at a glance, all the time.  Each of those numbers tells you how many jobs are in different states.  How many have completed, are processing or have failed, etc.

Beyond that, each of those icons is a button (with a rollover tooltip to remind you the exact meaning of the icon) that allows you to access the Jobs Drawer.  Let's start by clicking on the icon with the Yellow Arrow.  This opens the Job Drawer and shows us all the jobs in the system.

Next, we might want to just focus in on the jobs that failed, so we click on the Red Stop Sign.  That filters the jobs to only show ones with Failed status.  The screen below shows that this looks like.

Now, of course, when you see you have two failed jobs you'll want to find out why.  You can double click any of the jobs in the list and bring up the details of that job (example below).

The job details shows you each step in the job (many jobs have multiple components) and shows you the specific target(s) that may have failed (jobs can be directed and multiple hosts and may success against some and fail on others).  This then gives you the info you need to investigate the failure, determine the problem and then, if you so choose, rerun the job against failed targets with just the click of a button.

Posted at 05:00AM Jul 27, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  | 

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  |