Computer Associates is actually working on its Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) and 3.0 beta program is running. Related to this another beta program is running: Unicenter NSM Advanced System Management Option, which introduces a wide support to VMware technology:
High availability and reliability are keen issues facing today’s “always-on” IT operations centers. Unicenter supports a number of ways to enhance reliability, including management of your virtualization or clustering environments that support mission critical business applications.
The IT industry continues to seek ways to use the newest in technology (processors, storage, memory, communications, and software) to improve the application environment by increasing performance; optimizing processor utilization through workload management, scalability, and reliability; increasing organizational efficiency by reducing costs of hardware, software, and staff; and reducing both the number and the impact of system outages regardless of the underlying reason. That’s where Unicenter® Network and Systems Management Advanced System Management Option (ASMO) comes in with real-time analysis of the virtualization environment, and dynamic allocation and de-allocation of over or under utilized resources
Unicenter NSM Advanced Systems Management Option leverages the intelligence in Unicenter NSM and Agent technology to create a centralized, uniform infrastructure that allows you to discover and manage clusters, dynamically reconfigure resources, and discover and manage virtual machines.
The three business process views (CMO, DRO, VMO) created by Unicenter NSM Advanced Systems Management Option provide a fast, easy, and intuitive way of locating and organizing all of your clusters, resources, and virtual machines and their associated virtual machine instances. You can also get detailed views using the Unicenter Explorer or Unicenter 2D Map.
You can view and manage your environment from the Unicenter NSM System Command Center (SCC), and use role-based management to add users and assign rule-based roles to those users–role based management can be tailored to a user’s specific function. From the System Command Center (SCC), you can:
Distributed Workload Management: Manage your Microsoft and Linux clusters in an end-to-end eManagement environment-this includes discovery, visualization, health monitoring, active management, availability, performance monitoring, integration with third party cluster tools, and event management.
Distributed Resource Management: Dynamically reconfigure resources using Sun’s Dynamic Reconfiguration technology running on:
SUN’s Sun Fire and Starcat line of processors
VMware’s virtual machine environments for Linux or Windows
IBM’s LPAR environment for the pSeries systems
This reconfiguration of resources includes discovery of all of the elements in the infrastructures to make them available for management from the Unicenter NSM World View and provides real-time resource analysis which allows the DR Option engine to continuously balance utilization by allocating or de-allocating resources.
Virtual Machine Discovery Automatically discover VMware (GSX or ESX) and Microsoft Servers, including correct topology that shows the hosts and all of the virtual machine instances and provides real-time visual queues to the health and status of these machines. This management on demand capability includes:
Provisioning across physical servers
Root cause linkage (correlation of hierarchical events between virtual and physical layers)
Performance gathering for the virtual environment that will be fed to Systems Performance option and SLM for service level monitoring
Now the strange thing: CA talks about Distributed Resource Management for VMware virtual machines using Sun’s Dynamic Reconfiguration technology… But DR it’s a Solaris OS feature as I can read on an official SUN whitepaper:
Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) is a software mechanism that allows resources to beattached (logically added) or detached (logically removed) from the Solaris operating environment control without incurring any system downtime.
Do I start to think VMware is going to use SUN Solaris as hostOS or what…?