On Monday, December 4, CA is announcing a revision of a Unicenter software tool that consolidates management of a greater variety of vendors' clustered and virtualised servers.
The new Unicenter Advanced Systems Management r11.1 will support systems with virtualised servers and server clusters through a single interface, says Paula Daley, director of ASM marketing at CA. The same commands can be used by IT workers to manage virtual systems from VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
The latest version relies on Microsoft's SQL Server management database, replacing earlier versions' use of the Ingres database, she says. That earlier version, r11, provided management for Microsoft virtualisation as well as VMware.
John Coleman, manager of technology services at Wellspan Health in Pennsylvania, says he has been successfully testing the new release for about six weeks and hopes to use it to manage VMware and IBM virtual systems in January, with Microsoft systems added later next year.
"With virtualisation, you don’t have the physical equipment to touch for management, and things are always in constant flux," Coleman says. The first virtualisation software at Wellspan, from VMware, went live about nine months ago.
Coleman says every virtualisation vendor has a different management console, making the ASM tool valuable in a heterogeneous data centre such as Wellspan's. When Wellspan needs to reallocate computing tasks to different virtual machines based on demand changes, such a management tool comes in handy. "We can be dynamic," he says.
Coleman says CA has, a very good reputation for integration of tools such as ASM. "You can still call them up and discuss issues," he says. Coleman also says his staff favours using SQL Server over Ingres, although providing for database server hardware has been an additional expense, he says.
Documenting what task is running on a virtual server would be nearly impossible because a given task “might not be there tomorrow,” he says. Daley says that ASM could help IT staffers know when a mission-critical application begins to fail so that additional memory or processing power could be found on another virtual server.
Market research company IDC is predicting an acceleration in IT shops that use several virtualisation products for next year, says Stephen Elliot, an IDC analyst. He advised that IT managers make purchases of management software a priority in coming budgets.
Andi Mann, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Colorado says tools such as ASM will become more valuable. “Virtualised environments are going to become the norm eventually,” he says.
ASM requires a user to have CA’s Network and System Management tool, a separate product that starts at about US$10,000. ASM, which is available, starts at about US$30,000, a CA spokesman says.
