IBM Unveils Virtual and Physical Management Tool

As data centers continue to adopt virtualization, the need for tools and applications to help simplify management and keep costs down continue to grow as well. IBM believes it has an answer to these types of problems.

IBM introduced its systems management portfolio that allows a company to discover, monitor and manage diverse virtual and physical computing resources from a common portal, including IBM and non-IBM systems and software.

The IBM Systems Director family allows clients to manage all of their virtual and physical resources in the data center, and consists of IBM’s Director Server Management Software and TotalStorage Productivity Center, IBM Enterprise Workload Manager, IBM Usage and Accounting Manager, IBM z/OS Management Console and IBM Tivoli Monitor Systems Edition.

The new IBM Virtualization Manager software offering significantly reduces the number of management tools needed to support multiple types of servers. The Virtualization Manager dashboard operates in a web-based user interface, and works across multiple major virtualization platforms. It includes initial support for VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen, and POWER-based virtualization offerings. Clients can also leverage the capabilities of VMware’s VirtualCenter by integrating it into IBM Director to provide a single point of management.

“The cost of administering increasingly complex systems is growing faster than the cost of new hardware – making system management the next frontier of virtualization,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, virtualization at IBM. “As customers deploy more virtualization and partitioning technology from multiple vendors, it’s creating a need for more simplified management of these diverse virtualized infrastructures. Building on years of experience with mainframe virtualization technologies and cross-enterprise systems management, IBM is helping clients effectively manage physical and virtual resources together.”

Clients taking advantage of IBM Virtualization Manager technology include Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, one of the largest scientific and engineering research organizations in Europe. The company is using the new Virtualization Manager technology to help manage a heterogeneous grid computer infrastructure of about 2,000 computers. Part of the grid computer uses IBM BladeCenter Systems with virtualization software from Xen and VMware.

“The Virtualization Manager extension to IBM Director provides a unique approach to systems management allowing us to more easily manage our virtual Xen and VMware environments on IBM BladeCenter in conjunction with our physical systems,” said Dr. Marcel Kunze, grid computing department leader, Institute for Scientific Computing. “By 2009, we anticipate quadrupling the number of servers we need to manage, so the need for a common management toolset is critical. This IBM Director extension provides a management interface to help simplify our virtual and physical systems.”

Clients of IBM System x, BladeCenter, System p, System i or System z can download IBM Virtualization Manager. The software runs on Windows and Linux for System x and BladeCenter. The software will support VMware, Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, and System p and i virtualization.

For more information, visit IBM’s Web site.