Today CiRBA announced release 7.1 of CiRBA Control Console, one of the components of its capacity management tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI), that will be generally available in July. This new release extends the same technology used with VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX Infrastructures based on IBM PowerVM Platform. CiRBA 7.1 is able to analyze all the PowerVM Platform advanced capabilities like Logical Partitions (LPARs), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS), shared processor pools, Capacity on Demand and HA failover nodes providing detailed infrastructure healt reports valorized with historical utilization data and comparehensive policies, that determine where and with how many resources, workloads and applications should be placed within the infrastructure. 
Here are the feature of this release:
- Visualize the health of PowerVM Infrastructure through a Single Console – CiRBA’s Control Console reveals whether or not VMs, hosts or host groups have “Too little infrastructure”, “Too Much Infrastructure” or are “Just Right”, providing an at-a-glance view of what is at risk, what is inefficient and where action needs to be taken.
- Measure the overall efficiency of PowerVM environments with the CiRBA Efficiency Index (CEI) – CEI reflects how many servers are truly required vs. how many exist based on all the constraints in an environment including utilization, policy, and growth, enabling organizations to understand, measure and proactively manage the amount of waste or excess capacity in an environment.
- Control Capacity Reservations and Increase Forecasting Accuracy with Bookings – CiRBA provides a Bookings Management System to track the flow of workloads and hosts due to come into or leave an environment. CiRBA determines where new workloads can and should go into the environment, models the impact of new hosts or host changes and determines the appropriate placements and allocation changes. The bookings information also feeds into forecasted views of capacity requirements to accurately determine when a shortfall will occur.
- Get Prescriptive Actions to Avoid Capacity Shortfalls – CiRBA’s Action System provides specific actions to resolve and prevent shortfalls for host groups, resource pools, hosts, VMs and VIOS, such as rebalancing and allocation changes. In Version 7.1, CiRBA can also make recommendations for resizing hosts in order to accept new workloads, leveraging IBM’s Capacity Upgrade on Demand capability. Recommendations can be pushed to third party ticketing, orchestration or management systems to automate key processes and changes.
- Gain Visibility into Available Capacity and Waste – CiRBA’s Action System also specifies where resources can safely be reclaimed from VMs, where new workloads can be placed, and how much spare capacity exists in an environment. Allocation recommendations ensure that VMs are sized correctly, and policies dictate minimum/maximum allocation values for CPU and memory, the use of capped vs. uncapped vs. dedicated CPUs, and take into account advanced configurations such as 2-node PowerHA™ pairs.