Jean-Christophe Martin's blog

Sun to open source Ops Center

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:18:00 GMT

In a previous post, I mentioned the announcement of the Sun's Ops Center product targeted to the management of virtual environments. In this post, I said that Ops Center was a re-branded N1 System Manager, while in fact, it seems that this is a merge of the Sun Connection and N1 System Manager in one tool :

A highly scalable datacenter automation tool merging discover, update, provisioning, monitoring, and reporting technologies from Sun Connection and N1SM into one tool.

However, by looking at the Oracle World demo, it seems that the UI is radically different from the N1 System Manager (gone the embedded CLI ?).

Also, by looking at the supported platform, it seems that Windows platform is not supported anymore :
Sun N1 System Manager :

From a centralized management console, customers can provision Solaris, Linux, and Windows with a simple drag-and-drop, and monitors the health of systems in an efficient manner.

Sun Ops Center :

The comprehensive, highly scalable Linux and Solaris life cycle management tool.

The good news is that Sun Ops Center will be delivered as open source too :

Building on Sun's commitment to open standards and customer choice, Sun will continue to innovate the Sun xVM platform and collaborate with open source communities. The first of Sun's contributions will be the Common Agent Container (CAC) code to the OpenxVM.org community under GPLv3. The CAC is the heart of the management infrastructure for many of Sun's products, including the Sun xVM Ops Center. In addition, Sun plans to make the entire code base used by Sun xVM Ops Center available to the OpenxVM.org community in the first quarter of 2008.

It's not clear however if this means the end of life for the N1 System Manager, since right now, the Ops Center does not provide a complete replacement.

Technorati Tags: datacenter management, opensource, Ops Center, Sun, system management

Sun XVM and Ops Center

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:36:29 GMT

Sun announced new virtualization products last week. It seems to be a version of Xen hypervisor running on solaris . So now, Sun has three Solaris virtualization technologies: XVM, Solaris Containers, and LDOM. So, what it means is that a Sparc Server can be running a solaris container in a solaris XVM in an LDOM. This is 3 layers of virtualizations.

Also, in this announce, Sun presents Ops Center. This is a re-branded N1 System Manager. It seems that the focus will be on the management of the hardware, up to the operating system, combined with Sun Connection.

Mark Hamilton told The Register:

Sun has also announced a new management software package, Ops Center, that will work as a command and control console for physical and virtual gear- that's to say the hypervisor and Solaris Containers. Sun said the software also includes discovery and inventory, application provisioning, software lifecycles automation, hardware and software monitoring and compliance reporting. Sun brazenly says "it does everything except unpack boxes and rack and cable systems."

Ops Center is going to be released in December. It will be interesting to see how this can be leveraged by Configuration Automation tools like what BMC announced recently.

Technorati Tags: datacenter management, system management, virtualization

BMC announce Service Automation

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:10:56 GMT

Today, along with the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, and following the acquisition of Realops, BMC announced the Service automation suite of solutions. This includes :

Discovery and mapping of the complete IT environment, including its relationships to business processes and transactions
Full-scale Configuration Automation capability across network devices, physical and virtual servers, and client systems
Change Management to support configuration policy adherence and process automation
Orchestration and automation of activities supporting IT processes, reducing errors and expenses in task execution across operational processes and toolsets
Automation of Continuous Compliance, including audit and enforcement of standard configurations across heterogeneous IT environments

I've been working on the second item in the list for the past year, and now that more of this is announced, I'll provide more information about what this does, and how runbook automation, coupled with configuration automation can solve many of the challenges that IT operators face today.

Technorati Tags: Business Service Management, configuration management, datacenter management, system management