Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms

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

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Features, advantages and benefits
FeaturesAdvantagesBenefits
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.

Supported platforms

Product requirements:

Overview on supported operating systems for Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms V3.2


Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms at a glance
For Intel®-based servers
Hardware requirements:
• IBM System x
• BladeCenter® HS20 and HS40
• Any 32-bit Intel-based server
• Any 64-bit AMD64 or Intel EM64T–based server
Operating system requirements:
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) 32-, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11) 32-, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 32-, 64-bit
• Windows Server 2008 R1 Standard Edition 32-, 64-bit
• Windows Server 2008 R1 Enterprise Edition 32-, 64-bit
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition 64-bit
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit

For IBM System i
Operating system requirements:
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11) 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 64-bit

For IBM System p
Operating system requirements:
• AIX 5.2 32-, 64-bit
• AIX 6.1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11) 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 64-bit

For System z
Hardware requirements:
• Any System z or predecessor server that is supported by one of the supported Linux distributions or z/OS
• All System z processors
Operating system requirements:
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11) 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 64-bit

For Sun Microsystems servers
Hardware requirements:
• Any SPARC-based server
Operating system requirements:
• Solaris 10

 
Page last updated on April 23, 2010.

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