IBM Power server - Systems Management

DEPLOY – Discover what you have and set up new Power Systems

• IBM Systems Director is the foundation for all platform management of Power servers, providing automatic discovery of Power server resources, including visualization of resource topologies and relationships across physical and virtual servers.
• Systems Director VMControl Standard Edition provides tools to capture, create, store, modify and deploy virtual server images including an instance of the AIX operating system, middleware and applications. This is an optional feature for Systems Director, providing automation capabilities that not only make provisioning new services faster and easier, but also help to reduce the errors and troubleshooting time that often result from manual installations. Additional advantages include dynamic allocation of storage and network resources in the virtual appliance to the host server.
• Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition reduces complexity and provides added efficiency with the ability to manage a pool of new or existing virtualized Power servers as a single logical entity. This optional feature for Systems Director is capable of rapidly deploying system images within system pools as well as dynamic virtual server placement and mobility.
• Systems Director Network Control provides the ability to discover and inventory of supported network hardware devices along with existing server and storage management capabilities of IBM Systems Director that can help reduce the cost of managing physical and virtualized environments.

• AIX Enterprise Edition and Management Edition for AIX include Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager which provides an enterprise service management capability to discover Power servers and applications, their relationships of those components, and a graphically display of the component topology.

  
  

  Additional tools that can assist with deployment include:

  • IBM Systems Planning Tool helps you to size, order and set up a virtualized environment at a component level, and then install AIX and Linux partitions with just a few mouse clicks.
  • Cluster Systems Management provides platform level installation and setup commands to create and configure clustered Power servers running AIX, IBM i and Linux for Power and System x servers running Linux.
  • Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Operating Systems Deployment provides bare-metal deployment of AIX and Linux operating systems on Power servers.

MONITOR – Know the status of your Power Systems

• IBM Systems Director provides a single platform-level console that can show you the health and status of physical and virtual resources, as well as provide base monitoring and event management of OS metrics including CPU and memory utilization.
• Systems Director Network Control can monitor the status of supported network hardware devices in the IT infrastructure with the ability to view high-level status of supported devices as well as lower level component status for individual devices.

• AIX Enterprise Edition and Management Edition for AIX include Tivoli Monitoring which delivers enterprise service management monitoring of the health and availability of Power Systems resources such as Central Electronics Complexes (CEC), Logical Partitions (LPAR), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS) and Hardware Management Consoles (HMC), and collects historical data to assist planning and service level management. Management Edition for AIX is recommended for systems that already have AIX 5.3 or AIX 6 installed. Tivoli Monitoring also includes advanced performance analytics function that can be used for capacity management purposes such as predicting future resource shortages based on usage trends. This capability is based on the data gathered by Tivoli Monitoring that is stored in the built-in Tivoli Data Warehouse.

  
  

  Additional monitoring tools include:

  • Performance Management for Power Systems is an automated performance analysis and capacity planning offering that allows you to monitor your IBM i and AIX systems or partitions with little effort. It can easily help you spot utilization trends that will need your attention in the future. Performance Management for Power Systems includes basic reports for no additional charge, and provides an option for an advanced reporting package for a nominal charge. These capacity reports can be very useful in helping you plan for and manage the growth and performance of your system.
  • Cluster Systems Management provides platform level monitoring, alerting and automated responses for distributed and clustered Power servers running AIX, IBM i and Linux and System x servers running Linux from a single point of control.

ANALYZE and TROUBLESHOOT – Identify and report energy and resource usage in your operational infrastructure

• Active Energy Manager is a plug-in for IBM Systems Director that enables platform monitoring and reporting of energy consumption across supported Power servers and facilities equipment within the IT infrastructure. It reports information on both current and historical trend analysis of energy and thermal status for monitored systems and facilities equipment. This broad perspective enables you to make required adjustments that can ensure your server operations fit within your energy policies and constraints. Active Energy Manager also works in conjunction with the EnergyScale™ technology in selected POWER6 processor-based servers to automate setting energy limits and reduction controls.
• Systems Director Network Control provides troubleshooting capabilities of supported network devices by its drill-down ability in order to evaluate component errors of individual devices.
• IBM Systems Director Service and Support Manager is a call home plug-in to IBM Systems Director that monitors events and transmits system service information to IBM. The IBM Electronic Service Agent tool is integrated into the IBM Systems Director Service and Support Manager. Electronic Service Agent is a no-charge callhome extension to IBM Systems Director that automatically reports hardware problems and collects system service information for Power servers with AIX. With these functions, Electronic Service Agent can monitor, track, and capture system hardware errors and service information and report them directly to IBM support for you.
• AIX Enterprise Edition and Management Edition for AIX include Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager Virtualization Edition which helps to justify IT resources and expenses by providing the ability to measure, analyze and report resource utilization on virtualized Power servers. Management Edition for AIX is recommended for systems that already have AIX 5.3 or AIX 6.1 installed.

Another tool that can assist with problem analysis is Cluster Systems Management which helps to minimize downtime of server clusters by providing platform level software diagnostic tools that analyze software components and servers to quickly identify the root cause of a problem.

OPTIMIZE – Adjust Power server resource utilization, workloads and energy use to meet business requirements

• IBM Systems Director that provides the platform management tools to discover, visualize, and monitor both physical and virtual servers from a single console. The optional Systems Director VMControl Express Edition plug-in interoperates with PowerVM virtual server environments providing the ability to create, manage, delete and relocate virtual machines. Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition extends scalability to virtualized resource pools to measure aggregate utilization as well as provide dynamic virtual server placement and relocation. For energy management, the Systems Director Active Energy Manager plug-in enables monitoring and control of energy usage across one or more supported servers and devices within the IT infrastructure. For optimization of workloads in your Power server environment, the Workload Partitions Manager plug-in centralizes the creation of management of workload partitions (WPAR) across multiple systems, providing enablement for Live Application Mobility. The IBM Systems Director console also allows you to launch and execute optimization operations from the following solutions:
  • Integrated Virtualization Manager helps with processor partitioning, managing logical partitions (LPAR), and virtual storage and Ethernet management on a single server. It is included at no additional charge with the purchase of PowerVM, lowering the cost of entry into virtualization on Power Systems.
  • Hardware Management Console is a dedicated appliance that helps to configure and manage partitions as well as Capacity on Demand processor and memory activations on Power Systems.

MAINTAIN AND UPDATE – Keep your Power Systems up to date

• IBM Systems Director’s unified management console allows you to update software and firmware on Power servers, and update Hardware Management Console firmware. An optional communications link to IBM proactively informs you when a new OS or firmware version is available to download and install. Systems Director also provides the ability to launch and execute system administrative tasks using the following solutions:
  • IBM Systems Director Console for AIX provides web-based management access to common systems administration tasks on the AIX operating system. This solution can be used with or without IBM Systems Director.
  • IBM System i Navigator is a Microsoft Windows-based tool that offers a graphical interface with platform level server navigation, configuration, planning capabilities for your IBM i operating environments.

For clustering environments, Cluster Systems Management provides a platform level configuration file manager to distribute and synchronize files across nodes or node groups.