IBM® Systems Director 6.1 is a platform management solution that streamlines the way physical and virtual systems are managed across a multi-system environment. IBM Systems Director leverages industry standards to support multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM platforms, including Power Systems™ servers. Through a single Web-based user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for visualizing managed systems and determining how these systems relate to one another while identifying their individual status.
Management of Power Systems servers is simplified through the exceptional value of IBM Systems Director. The tool manages the underlying hardware, operating systems, and platform managers, such as Hardware Management Console (HMC) and Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM). Key features that enable lifecycle management include discovery, health and status monitoring, configuration, updates, and virtualization. It also provides a Welcome Page summary view that is specific to Power Systems servers and functions that are specific to the Power platform.
You can use the Power Systems features within Systems Director to do the following:
- Manage Power environments that include POWER5™ and POWER6™ processor-based servers running the AIX®, IBM i, or Linux® operating systems and the following:
- Power Systems servers managed by the Hardware Management Console (HMC)
- Power Systems servers managed by the Integrated Virtualization Manager (including POWER processor-based BladeCenter® servers)
- A Power Systems server with a single image
- A POWER processor-based BladeCenter server under the control of a BladeCenter management module
- Perform management tasks on systems that are under the control of the HMC and IVM, including managing power, creating virtual servers, editing virtual server resources, and relocating virtual servers between host systems
- Visualize relationships between virtual resources and physical resources
- Perform operating system specific management tasks that are available from the IBM Systems Director Console for AIX and the IBM Systems Director Navigator for IBM i
- Collect inventory of virtual storage and associated storage pools hosted by IBM i and used by client Power logical partitions (LPARs) and iSCSI-attached Intel® architecture BladeCenter blade and System x™ servers, providing intuitive viewing and management of those hosted servers
Systems Director 6.1 simplifies IT management for Power Systems users in several key areas:
- Consolidated management of physical and virtual resources
- Health monitoring
- Automation
- Updates
- Energy management