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]