Feature Story

By Leslie T. O'Neill

December 4, 2007 - Virtualization has revolutionized the datacenter more than any other technology in the last ten years. But all the benefits offered in a virtualized environment have come with a corresponding cost — the proliferation of technology and increased management demands. Customers have needed to purchase separate management tools, which increased complexity. Sun rectifies that with a new product line called Sun xVM — the Intersection of Virtualization and Management. Sun xVM is designed to help customers mitigate the complexity inherent in virtualization solutions by addressing both the virtualization and management of heterogeneous assets. Today, Sun launches the first product in the Sun xVM family, Sun xVM Ops Center— a comprehensive tool for managing thousands of Linux and Solaris OS-based multi-vendor x64/86 and SPARC systems. Sun xVM Ops Center simplifies the discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring, and reporting of both the virtual and physical assets in your datacenter via one unified interface.

"Sun xVM Ops Center is specifically designed to work in existing datacenters, even if the companies aren't currently running Sun technology. Today, there are a bunch of manual tasks IT administrators have to do in a datacenter, and most of them have always required separate management tools. But Sun xVM Ops Center will let you automate everything — except unwrapping the Sun boxes — and integrate those management tools into one, easy-to-use product," explains Oren Teich, director of marketing for xVM Ops Center.

Sun xVM Ops Center consolidates a number of key management capabilities:

• Advanced software update management
• Compliance reporting
• Hardware and software discovery
• Provisioning of server firmware, lights-out bare metal operating systems, and applications
• System and operating system monitoring
• Threshold settings and alerts
• Scalable for global IT environments with thousands of assets to manage

Simplifying Management

Up to now, popular virtualization offerings have tended to lack the integrated management tools IT administrators need to stay current with datacenter applications and security.

Sun xVM Ops Center simplifies datacenter management by combining several related functions, which previously could be accessed only by a group of piecemeal applications, into an all-in-one tool. Further, its point-and-click interface, based on the latest Web technologies, will be instantly familiar to Microsoft Windows administrators. With Sun xVM Ops Center, an enterprise can more easily and cost-effectively manage rapid growth as well as datacenter consolidation while also enabling massive scalability.

Integrating Five Key Tools

Sun xVM Ops Center automatically handles just about every management task you need to perform in your datacenter, including updating firmware, provisioning operating systems, installing applications, monitoring for any problems, and keeping operating systems current with patches. Whether your datacenter is deploying into physical or virtual environments, Sun xVM Ops Center adds a powerful automation tool to your datacenter arsenal. With it, you can manage Red Hat, SuSe, and Solaris machines from one simple and easy-to-use Web browser interface, complete with familiar drag-and-drop functionality. Also, it will keep you abreast of new updates and rules, and it will deploy updates in parallel to all relevant systems.

"Sun xVM Ops Center is a comprehensive product with five categories of integrated functionality -- discovery, monitoring, provisioning, updating, and reporting," explains Teich. "But we're making it available in three modules to give customers the flexibility of choosing the level of functionality that's right for them."

Through its automated provisioning capabilities, Sun xVM Ops Center will help you deploy systems more quickly than ever before. It can automatically provision Linux or Solaris to a new system to take on the state of an existing system or a predefined installation. Sun xVM Ops Center continues to help ensure the deployed enviornment remains updated. In fact, Sun xVM Ops Center can identify the patches required for more than 100 servers and determine their impact on the systems in just 15 minutes. Its disaster recovery features are equally speedy — it can restore a server to its pre-disaster inventory of components in less than 30 minutes.

Supporting Compliance

Maintaining regulatory compliance is an enterprise-wide endeavor, which must be supported also in the datacenter. Sun xVM Ops Center helps you implement compliance policies across the enterprise, as well as deploy updates to your policies to sites around the world in just minutes. To comply with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for instance, you can review detailed audit trails of actions taken on specific systems.

Building on a Proven Code Base

Sun melded together technologies from the management stacks of two successful products, Sun's N1 System Manager and Sun Connection Satellite, and added a new, easy-to-use interface that was developed with the latest Web technologies.

"N1 System Manager does great provisioning and Sun Connection has world-class patching tools. Sun integrated these great tools and made them even better by adding new functionality and introducing a really easy-to-use Web browser interface. And, Sun xVM Ops Center is much more scalable than previous management tools," says Teich.

Today's launch of Sun xVM Ops Center — the first product available in the xVM family of virtualization solutions — marks the next phase of Sun's innovative approach to virtualization. Stay tuned for the release of Sun xVM Server, a cross-platform, high-efficiency, open-source hypervisor that will run Windows, Linux, and Solaris guest OS instances. Also coming is an open source edition of xVM Ops Center that will be licensed under GPL (GNU General Public License) v3.

For more information, join openxvm.org, the open source community for building datacenter virtualization and management technologies. Or go to www.sun.com/xvmopscenter.