High availability and policy-based automation for applications and services across heterogeneous environments
Ensures continuous high availability and reduces frequency and duration of service disruptions for critical applications and middleware running on heterogeneous platforms and virtualization technologies.
Increase availability and reduce disruptions across numerous heterogeneous platforms and virtual environments, including Microsoft® Windows®, IBM AIX®, Linux® (including Linux on IBM System z®, System p®, System i®, System x®), and Solaris.
- Initiates, executes and coordinates the automated starting, stopping, restarting and failing over of individual application components or entire composite applications to help reduce the frequency and duration of incidents that impact IT availability
- Provides a standard toolset that supports multiple failover scenarios involving both physical and virtual environments
- Offers advanced clustering technologies, including support for sophisticated clustering configurations—such as N:1 or N:M configurations—to help reduce the number of required hardware servers and ensure continuous high availability of business-critical services
- Delivers advanced, policy-based automation to ease operational management of complex IT infrastructures by eliminating the need for extensive programming skills to create and maintain scripts and procedures
- Extends virtualization support through automation policies
- Provides plug-and-play policy modules that integrate best practices for key Tivoli® and third-party software solutions, allowing out-of-the-box failure detection and recovery to help drive operational cost savings and continuous high availability
- Provides a Web-based, easy-to-use and powerful GUI to make error-free configuration changes
- Speeds recovery through the ability to define resource dependencies to quickly associate conditions with resources, enabling operators to choose the proper corrective actions within the right context
- Goal-driven automation with new policy elements to reduce downtime and speed up operations
- Critical data protection through quorum, dead-man switch, and disk and network tiebreaker
- Helps optimize IT resource utilization
- Integrates with the broader Tivoli portfolio of high availability and event automation offerings that enable systematic implementation and execution of high availability operations across applications, middleware and platforms
- Integrates with IBM Tivoli System Automation Application Manager for end-to-end automation and to operate composite applications and extensive reporting
What’s new in IBM Tivoli® System Automation for Multiplatforms
- Support for additional platforms, including Sun Solaris and Windows Server 2008
- An optional xDR component that extends Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ (GDPS®)—the world-class disaster recovery solution for z/OS®—to provide robust business continuity for Linux® on System z®
- Support for major virtualization technologies on the supported platforms, including IBM z/VM®, VMware and new virtualization features within AIX® 6
- The ability to track and report on the amount of time it takes to start, stop and failover applications during general run time to better manage recovery times against a recovery time objective
- Enhanced configuration graphical user interface to quickly and easily create and edit policies, without the need to view or edit XML
- Precanned policies for supporting high availability for dynamic data center solutions and virtualization
Learn more
Buy Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms
IBM Software Subscription and Support is included in the product price for the first year.
Download software online after purchase - no shipping costs.
| Features | Advantages | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Customizable out of the box resource monitoring | Out of the box outage detection | Fast outage detection reducing operator requirements for manual monitoring |
| Automatic start, stop and move of your applications | Takes care of cluster-wide relationships, start/stop order and required pre and post start/stop actions | Relieves operator from manual command entry. Improves efficiency by reducing operator errors. |
| Resources can be grouped into applications. Grouping can be cluster-wide | Reduces complexity of operations by automating at the application level, reducing manual intervention and need to remember application components and dependencies | Improves efficiency, reliability and serviceability of the IT Infrastructure enabling a better integration of IT resources with business goals |
| Able to define interdependent resource relationships and associate conditions with resources | Frees operators from remembering application components and relationships. Can use sophisticated knowledge about application components and their relationships to decide corrective actions within the right context. | Reduces operations errors. Improves service levels and optimal IT resource utilization by enabling lower-priority business applications to be shut down while keeping higher-priority business applications running based on business priorities. |
| Policy-based automation | New resources or systems can be added without re-writing scripts | Reduces automation implementation time, and coding and support effort. Leverages manpower through reduced education requirements. No programming skills are required for policy definition. Eases application growth and scaling. |
| Graphical user interface policy editor | Create policies easier with no XML or command line scripting and allows you to quickly visualize dependencies | Lowers the learning curve and enables operators to identify application dependencies quickly |
| Reliable and Scalable | Cluster-wide heart-beating and reliable messaging service | Helps faster cluster implementation to enable a more reliable, dynamic automation |
| Disk Heart beat | This feature adds resilience to the cluster infrastructure. It helps to avoid the trade-off between data integrity and application availability in the majority of cases. | This improves the availability of the applications being managed by System Automation for Multiplatform (SA MP). |
| Integration with GPFS | Seamless integration of GPFS with SA MP | Customers can benefit from GPFS features like data mirroring and information lifecycle management while keeping their application highly available. |
| Support for up to 130 nodes per cluster | Much greater flexibility. DB2 customers in particular have a need to support large clusters. | Supports more of the customer's actual infrastructure as it is today. |
| Operations Console support for Moving Applications | Previously, moving applications to another machine to perform maintenance on the first machine could only be carried out from the CLI. Users can now use the same Operations Console as they use for other functions to perform the move. | Greater user productivity. Less knowledge needed of command-line interface to carry out routine tasks. Improved user interface. Actions to be taken to move the Application can be checked against policies for consistency'. |
| Support for Solaris IP Multipathing | This Solaris feature combines two network adapters to a virtual adapter in order to provide network adapter redundancy for applications. | Solution is more integrated with customer's other high availability strategies. Customers can benefit from network as well as server redundancy. |
| RSCT Resource Harvesting Capabilities | RSCT resources belonging to the classes IBM.NetworkInterface and IBM.AgFileSystem can be harvested (auto-detected). These are the two typical classes for which resources are referenced by customers. All found RSCT resources can be easily selected from a table when defining an SA MP resource. | Improved Time-to-Value through increased productivity and decrease in errors associated with the manual process. |
| Failback of IBM.Application resources | SA MP can start, stop, and monitor arbitrary applications when defined as IBM.Application resources in an SA MP policy. If such an application fails on one system, SA MP re-starts the application on a different system to make it available again. With Failback, SA MP can return the application to the original system once it is available again. | Better productivity, less effort to get an Application back to the primary server. Supports the way customers set up their infrastructure. |
| User interface improvements 1) Remove resource name truncation in Policy Editor 2) Auto-Save in Policy Editor 3) Printing graphical policy view in Policy Editor |
1) Objects in the Operations Console are shown with their full name instead of a truncated name. As many customer naming conventions led to machines with non-unique character strings at the beginning of the name, truncated names caused confusion. 2) Automatically saves work done in the policy editor which can be recovered should the WebSphere session timeout due to inactivity. 3) Users can print the graphical policy view to share with stakeholders, eg, the Application SMEs whose applications are being made highly available. |
1) Improved productivity and usability. Users can tell at-a-glance which component of their infrastructure they are viewing. 2) Saves user time reworking lost policy changes, and improves user satisfaction. 3) Improved usability facilitates communications of processes and leads to better HA planning. |
| Trace File Size Expansion | Trace file size is expanded to provide sufficient first failure data for analysis by the service team. | Improved Serviceability lowers TCO by reducing the time taken to identify product errors. |
| Additional preconfigured policies | New out-of-the-box policies will be provided via OPAL. | Faster Time-to-value. Saves effort in configuring policies for specific situations. |
Product requirements
Platform specific requirements for IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms (V1.2 only):
xSeries, 32 bit Intel based servers:
If RHAS 3.0 or RHEL 3.0 is used, the library compat-libstdc++ is required:
Check if the compat-libstdc++ is installed, with: rpm -q compat-libstdc++. If it is installed at that or a higher level, no further action is required.
Copy the compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.123.i386.rpm to all the nodes where you want to install SA for Linux. If you cannot find it on the RH installation CDs please go to: https://rhn.redhat.com/network/software/packages/details.pxt?pid=199449
Run the following on all of the nodes: rpm -U compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.123.i386.rpm
Install SA for Linux
pSeries:
If RHAS 3.0 or RHEL 3.0 is used, the library compat-libstdc++ is required:
Check if the compat-libstdc++ is installed, with: rpm -q compat-libstdc++. If it is installed at that or a higher level, no further action is required.
Copy the compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.123.ppc.rpm to all the nodes where you want to install SA for Linux. If you cannot find it on the RH installation CDs please go to: https://rhn.redhat.com/network/software/packages/details.pxt?pid=199449
Run the following on all of the nodes: rpm -U compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.123.ppc.rpm
Recommendation for 1-2 node cluster
RSCT requires that at least one other adapter in the network exists, so that packets can be exchanged between the local and remote adapter. Without such an adapter, a local adapter would be unable to receive any packets. Therefore, there would be no way to confirm that the local adapter is working. Therefore we recommend to add machine names to file /usr/sbin/cluster/netmon.cf on each cluster node. These machines should be routers or any machines that are external to the configuration, but are reachable from one of the networks being monitored by the subsystem. Any entry in this file is used as a target for a probing packet when RSCT is attempting to determine the health of a local adapter. The format of the file is as follows:
machine name or IP address 1
machine name or IP address 2
.........
Where the IP addresses are in dotted decimal format. If the file does not exist, it should be created. To remove this recovery action, remove the entries added to the file, delete the file, or rename the file.
Page last updated on August 28, 2007.
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