CA's Unicenter Advanced Systems Management: Virtualization Cluster Management

Research Brief
CA's Unicenter Advanced Systems Management: Virtualization Cluster Management for Heterogeneous Environments
Introduction Last month we published an article describing IBM's Virtualization Manager - a product that manages a variety of virtualization products including open source Xen, IBM POWER-based servers, Intel-based servers running EMC's VMware, and servers running Microsoft Virtual Server. We pointed out "with IBM Virtualization Manager, IT managers and administrators can make use of a single, web-based dashboard with a common, graphically-driven user interface to drive workloads toward available resource pools, to identify infrastructure problems, or to add or delete virtual machines residing on distributed servers or desktops". The whole point: IBM's virtualization makes the management of disparate, heterogeneous systems resources easier to manage through the use of one common, graphically-driven interface. Within weeks, CA (formerly know as Computer Associates) announced its plan to unify and simplify the management of heterogeneous, virtualized system environments - a product that supports its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision. And, as part of this management plan, CA announced a new, unified, virtualization management product "Unicenter Advanced Systems Management" (ASM). And just like IBM's Virtualization Manager, Unicenter ASM focuses on simplifying the management of heterogeneous virtualized resources. Only, there are several important differences between the two: . Unicenter ASM offers tools specifically designed for the management of physical and/or virtualized machines including those residing in clusters; . ASM has a very strong focus on business continuity and availability; . Unicenter ASM is platform agnostic (it can run on Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and other server environments); . Unicenter ASM's interface is graphically driven, offering a very granular look at the utilization of CPU, memory, and other systems resources across heterogeneous, distributed systems environments and within clusters; and, . Unicenter ASM also provides dynamic resource brokering - a service that dynamically allocates and de-allocates resources automatically and on-demand based upon business policies, optimizing the availability and performance of virtualized platforms In this Research Brief, Clabby Analytics takes a closer look at CA's Unicenter Advanced Systems Management. And we find Unicenter ASM to be a very effective tool for managing distributed, and especially clustered, heterogeneous virtualized environments. CA's Unicenter ASM: Virtualization and Cluster Management for Heterogeneous Environments
The Problems That CA's Unicenter Advanced Systems Management Solves Virtualization is all about taking physical computing resources (systems, storage, networks, and clients) and organizing those resources into logical resource "pools". Unused resources within these pools can be exploited by other applications - thus increasing the amount of utilization an enterprise can get out of existing resources. One of the biggest problems created when virtualizing resources is keeping track of where resources are and what's running on them. For instance, multiple virtualized machines (VMs) can run on a single server or desktop using something called a "hypervisor". A hypervisor is simply a scheme that allows multiple operating environments to run in virtual machines on a single system at the same time. By using a hypervisor, a single server or desktop could host four or five (or more) different operating systems. And a hundred servers or desktops could thus feasibly run four or five hundred different virtual machines. Keeping track of where VMs have been deployed, and how they are being utilized, can be quite complex. Virtualization software allows all of the individual virtual machines created by a hypervisor to be pooled. Resources in these pools can then be made available to applications that need access to additional computing power. But another problem that enterprises run into when virtualizing heterogeneous resources is that there are many virtualization schemes and products available in the marketplace - and they don't all work cooperatively together. Hence, Sun's N1 virtualization environment (for example) does not manage EMC's VMware environment, nor vice versa. So, if an enterprise uses heterogeneous systems, and each... [download for more]