Whether through LPARs or disparate systems, as the proliferation of virtual operating system instances continues to grow within our IT environments, it is becoming more and more imperative that we leverage mechanisms for centralized management. IBM Systems Director is an ideal way to provide centralized management for a wide range of endpoints--including AIX instances. Let's take a closer look at several Systems Director functions that will benefit AIX administrators.

 

Systems discovery and inventory are two of the foundational functions of Systems Director. With these two functions, the AIX administrator has a view into both the hardware that the AIX instances are running on as well as an inventory of the software installed on the AIX instances. Like most other functions in Systems Director, systems discovery and inventory can be manually initiated by the system administrator or performed on a scheduled basis.

 

Let’s take a look at how Systems Director can be used to manage the software updates for multiple AIX instances. Through the integrated update manager, Systems Director has the capability to download a list of available updates (essentially metadata for the updates) from the IBM update web site--a scheduled task could be established to download the list of updates on, as an example, a weekly basis. Having the list of updates is a good first step. The next step is to define the list of systems to check the updates against, as well as the types of updates we are interested in for those systems--this definition is referred to as a compliance policy by Systems Director. Now, when Systems Director identifies systems that are out of compliance (based on a comparison of the downloaded update list and the collected system inventory) the system will be flagged as out of compliance. The System Administrator could then either manually apply the updates or have a task automatically started by Systems Director to apply the identified updates.

 

With IBM Systems Director you can integrate the management of both physical and virtual resources. As an example, imagine you have an AIX partition running in a partition on a POWER system. The physical system, being monitored by IBM Systems Director, has a hardware predictive failure alert: IBM Systems Director will receive the alert. Through the use of action plans, IBM Systems Director could automatically initiate a Live Partition Mobility request to move the running AIX partition to another system before the failure could possibly disrupt the workload, thus making the workload resilient to hardware failures and also making the system with the predictive failure available for maintenance. Another function provided by the virtualization capability of Systems Director is the ability to create new virtual servers (LPARs). A single, unified, interface is provided for the virtual server definition regardless of whether the system being managed is using an HMC or IVM. Systems Director does also provide the ability to launch the HMC or IVM interfaces in context, that is for a specific function, if that need should arise.

 

In addition to the base functions provide by IBM Systems Director, there are a number of plug-ins available that provide additional functionality that can benefit AIX administrators. One of these, VMControl, extends the virtualization capabilities of Systems Director by providing the capability to capture and deploy AIX images. Imagine being able to capture an image of an AIX instance that is configured to satisfy a company’s requirements in regards to such items as software install and security configuration . . . and then be able to deploy a new instance of that image. The deployment would include the ability to define new characteristics for the LPAR (such as memory and processor) as well as new network configuration settings. VMControl takes care of the rest: It creates a new logical partition, creates virtual storage, restores the image, configures networking, and starts the new AIX instance. And if system pools are being used, based on available resources, VMControl can even determine the hardware system on which to deploy the new instance -- it doesn’t get much easier than that! 

 

Another plugin for IBM Systems Director is Active Energy Manager (AEM). AEM provides the ability to measure, monitor, and manage the energy components of the systems that the AIX instances are running on. Power thresholds can be established with AEM that would indicate that when a system reaches a certain power consumption, identified LPARs are either shutdown or moved (through Live Partition Mobility) to another system that is consuming a lower power footprint. 

 

The role of the AIX system administrator is critical to the enterprise because the system administrator is responsible for the stability, health, and availability of the IT environment. IBM Systems Director can be a great tool to assist the system administrator. These are just a few of the functions that IBM Systems Director provides and I would encourage the AIX system administrator to take a look at and explore Systems Director to aid them in their daily tasks. If you have a question or comment, drop me a note at aix@askerwin.com.