Virtualize More, Manage Less

IBM is undertaking a new initiative in the management of all physical and virtual resources in an IT environment. The IBM Systems Director family of platform management solutions is intended to unify the management of virtual and physical systems, storage, and networks by exploiting industry standards and innovative integration. To meet this goal, Systems Director family is anchored by IBM Director, which features the new IBM Virtualization Manager Extension, and IBM TotalStorage® Productivity Center (TPC) with built-in storage virtualization management.

Today's successful businesses tightly link financial strategy with bold changes in business processes. IT resource management is essential to leveraging this link. For the on demand enterprise, any moment can bring new issues to resolve, challenges to overcome, and opportunities to leverage. These business notions come straight out of the work of Harvard's J. A. Schumpeter, who posited that innovative and disruptive events drive an economy through a process he called “creative destruction.” Executing that strategy, however, is impossible without an agile infrastructure that deals with the realities of change as easily as the concept.

For IT, this requires a serious infusion of critical technologies affecting systems, middleware, and application architecture. One pivotal technology is the virtualization of systems, storage, and networks. The basic concept behind virtualization is simple: Separate the logical functionality of a resource from its physical constraints. The payoff for IT is equally straightforward: Managing the logical functionality of resources is much less demanding than managing their physical constraints and limitations.

"By providing a larger context and a common way to manage physical and virtualized resources, IBM Systems Director is intended to dramatically boost IT productivity and lower IT costs."

IBM and its business partners have been delivering virtualization technologies across the continuum of IT resources for some time. Fully leveraging the value of these virtualization technology solutions, however, demands a single unified management approach that can reconcile both the physical and virtual worlds. The alternative is to attempt to manage the IT environment as a distinct collection of isolated physical and virtualized resources. While the effort to manage each silo is less, the cumulative effect of managing all of those silos significantly reduces the sum of the benefits.

Avoiding Disruption by Managing For Change
Providing the capability to manage all physical and virtual platforms-from servers to storage to networks-and then link those resources to enterprise management policies and goals is a capability that is unique to the domain of IBM. Systems Director provides a unified platform management approach for all resources whether physical or virtual. More importantly, Systems Director provides that unified management through a modular open-standards approach that builds on existing offerings to produce immediately actionable solutions, for which clients can select the elements they need to virtualize more and manage less.

One key to success for IT is the ability to handle changes in the management of resources. Primary research conducted by IBM reveals that changes to the computing environment account for 85% of IT problems. When change management was viewed as a simple capacity planning issue, the solution was easy: over provision. Unfortunately, that notion has vanished. Today, IT must be able to devise, configure, and-most importantly-manage systems in a way that supports continuous adaptation. Since the only systems designed for immediately actionable change are logical systems, a critical strategy is to separate the logical functions of systems, storage, and network hardware from their physical implementations through virtualization.

Fortunately, the means to virtualize most physical resources is moving closer and closer to component-level devices through embedded technologies. In particular, IBM has delivered system resource virtualizers, such as processor hypervisors, Virtual I/O, and VLAN, via integrated embedded technologies for some time. Integrated resource virtualizers are now becoming part of commodity CPU processors from Intel and AMD.

Managing the Big Picture
What is distinctly missing from those resource-virtualizer scenarios is any sense of big-picture integration. As a result, the introduction of virtualization technology often leads to smaller than expected increases in administrator productivity. There is a basic reduction in the complexity of managing a physical infrastructure; however, the total amount of time spent on resource management is not optimally reduced, because administrators are faced with having to manage redundant silos of virtualized resources. Only full integration avoids separate user interfaces and the need to manually coordinate information across tools.

Comprehensive virtualization management, at a minimum, must contain core management capabilities, such as resource deployment, monitoring, configuration, problem determination and event handling as standard features. On top of that, many sites will also require higher level virtualization management features to handle grid constructs, such as the virtualization of workloads, in order to load balance applications designed to run in a service oriented architecture (SOA) environment. This is essential if IT is to assess the business impact of resource contention, performance bottlenecks, and, in the worst case, outages.

Real Payback
To provide a comprehensive and unified management environment, all IBM hardware offerings come with Systems Director software to assist the basic configuration and control of resources. Most importantly, the IBM Systems Director family immediately provides common platform-management capabilities through currently available software, including IBM Director, and IBM TotalStorage® Productivity Center. In addition, there are key extensions available for these products, including IBM Enterprise Workload Manager, IBM Tivoli Monitoring Systems Edition, IBM Usage and Accounting Manager, TPC Replication Manager , and the new IBM Virtualization Manager. By building upon an existing software base, the IBM Systems Director readily extends the management of physical and virtualized resources.

For the CIO, the IBM Systems Director offers an even bigger bottom line. Through integration with the IBM Tivoli® enterprise-management offerings, all of the benefits derived through IBM virtualization technologies can be combined with an IBM Service Management approach that includes advanced provisioning, scheduling, end-to-end application monitoring, and-most importantly-IT process automation. This opens the door to mapping business processes directly to dependent resources and the ability to manage resource-level usage and cost.

With the IBM Systems Director, IT will finally be able to take full command of their virtual environments. The equation is simple: By virtualizing more, IT will be able to manage less. Nonetheless, before IT can apply that equation and reap the full benefits that a virtual infrastructure provides, it must have the sophisticated tools needed to do the real job.