System Management: All things System Management

The Sun ISV integration team have been busy lately with upgrades to their Microsoft integrations and have posted them to Sun's 3rd party Integration page.

• Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 3.3
• Software
• Documentation
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 1.0.1
• Software
• Documentation
• IPMI System Management Driver 2.1 for Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Software

If you use 3rd party tools to manage your Sun servers there are 2 things you should be doing:

1. Check the xVM Ops Center page for Sun's own solution
2. Check the Sun 3rd party integration page regularly

We've just given the 3rd party page a bit of a tidy though no new integrations since the recent IBM Director addition. Right now there are about a dozen integrations and best practices on the page with more to come through the summer:

• Altiris Deployment Server 6.8
• BMC Patrol
• CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM)
• HP OpenView Operations for Unix
• HP OpenView Operations for Windows
• HP Systems Insight Manager
• IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM)
• IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus
• IBM Director
• Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Seems CA beat Scalent's announcement by one day! See their 9th June Press Release. CA Advanced Systems Management (CA ASM) added support for Sun's Logical Domains (LDOM). So what are they doing?

CA is currently the only management vendor to offer support for Sun's LDOM platform, which is a significant option for customers interested in Sun server consolidation initiatives. This support enables discovery and administration of the Sun virtual platform. It also offers performance and event management as well as dynamic reconfiguration of virtual resources.

Great to CA endorsing LDoms as well as Scalent.

Scalent recently announced support not only of Sun's highly innovative CoolThreads Servers including the latest T5140 and T5240 but also for LDoms the CoolThreads Hypervisor. More details can be found here. With all the noise about x64 hypervisors its worth remembering the arguments for LDoms can be pretty compelling - especially on the budget! I'm sure Scalent won't mind me quoting them:

LDoms is a powerful, open source, hardware virtualization and partitioning technology, and is provided as standard at no extra cost on UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 Plus-based servers. The latest SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers can support up to 128 LDoms per server, with superb granularity, all at no cost. Unlike proprietary virtualization technologies, LDoms can save customers up to $3,600 per system.

The Sun 3rd party ISV Integration team have been very busy lately complementing the work of the Sun xVM Ops Center team by adding more 3rd party integrations. Latest is an integration enabling Sun systems to work well with IBM's Director. The platforms included in the first 1.0 integration, with more to follow in the next release, are:

• Sun Fire X2100 M2, X2200 M2
• Sun Fire X4100, X4100 M2, X4150, X4200, X4200 M2
• Sun Fire X4500, X4600, X4600 M2
• Sun Blade X6220, X6250, T6300, T6320 Server Modules
• Sun Blade X8400, X8420, X8440 Server Modules
• Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000, T2000 Server
• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220 Server
• Sun Netra X4200 M2 Server