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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 |
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] |
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