CA Expands Its Unified Management of Virtualized Systems

November 2006 Ptak, Noel & Associates
The Authority in IT Convergence Strategies
CA Expands its Unified Management of Virtualized Systems The variety of available server virtualization technologies provides both choice and flexibility for enterprises seeking to optimize server CA, Inc. utilization and performance. However, as enterprises deploy more One CA Plaza virtualization solutions that are scattered across the enterprise, Islandia, NY 11749 managing the disparate virtualization technologies using fragmented Phone: (631) 342-6000 element-specific tools challenges IT staffs. CA's latest release of www.ca.com Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (ASM), release 11.1, addresses this challenge by consolidating the management of enterprise virtualized server environments into one management tool. Unicenter ASM's virtual systems management capabilities span from core management functions such as discovery and management of virtualized environments to dynamic virtual system resource management.
Unicenter ASM: Managing Virtual Systems Unicenter ASM discovers, visualizes, manages, and reports on heterogeneous virtualized server environments such as server clusters, server logical partitions (LPAR), and operating system virtualization solutions like VMware. Administrators manage the diverse virtualization technologies through a single management interface and approach. For example, the same commands are used to perform management tasks on all of the virtual systems such as Red Hat Linux Clusters, Microsoft Virtual Server, IBM pSeries eServer LPAR, and VMware, which reduces the need to learn and remember solution-specific commands. Built-in integration with each of the supported virtualization products allows administrators to monitor and control virtual system elements and environments from Unicenter ASM. For example, setting thresholds on the host, or setting up sending informational notifications to administrators when a node in a server cluster is not operational even though performance is not affected. Administrators can also adjust allocated system resources as needed, with the option of setting up automated dynamic management of virtual server resources based on demand. As an extension of CA's Network and Systems Management (NSM), Unicenter ASM manages virtualized servers while leveraging NSM's detailed management data for broader and deeper analysis, including evaluating host performance. Unicenter ASM's discovery identifies and gathers details of the various "flavors" of virtualized systems in the enterprise. It can also discover nodes that are outside of the subnet. All discovered
----------- © 2006 Ptak, Noel & Associates ----------- CA Expands its Unified Management of Virtualized Systems Page 2 virtual systems, their relationships, and details of the virtual servers are graphically depicted in Systems Command Center. This is the administrator's single interface to administer, configure, discover, and populate a collective view of the virtualized environments that exist in the enterprise. High-level management views are delivered through the Unicenter NSM Management Portal, which can display Unicenter ASM's virtualized environment performance metrics. This provides at-a-glance visibility to CIOs and IT managers of performance and service levels associated with specific virtualized platforms and business processes. In addition to these visualizations, Unicenter ASM offers a variety of performance reporting, including out-of-the-box Web-based reports, role-based reports, and historical and real-time analysis reports. One of the advanced features of Unicenter ASM is dynamic resource brokering, which performs real-time, dynamic management of virtualized systems in response to varying business demands. System utilization and performance is continuously optimized, based on user-defined policies, such as low and high threshold settings, machine and partition priority settings, and best practices. Unicenter ASM release 11.1 supports the following virtualized server environments: VMware ESX (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 3.0); VMware GSX (2.5, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2); Microsoft Virtual Server ... [download for more]