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Sun Management Center

General FAQ

Table of Contents
General Questions
  1. What is Sun Management Center?
  2. What are the key new features of Sun Management Center latest release, 4.0?
  3. What specifically are the enhancements to Solaris Container support?
  4. How does Sun Management Center fit into Solaris Enterprise System?
  5. When should I use Sun Management Center and when should I use N1 System Manager?
  6. What hardware platforms does Sun Management Center support?
  7. How have agent deployment and updating been simplified?
  8. How have installation process been simplified?
  9. What does it mean for Sun MC to be highly available?
  10. What training class is available today for Sun Management Center?
  11. What are the other products in the management portfolio?
 
 

General Questions

1.
Q:
What is Sun Management Center?
A:
Sun MC is a core component of the Sun software family. To help increase service levels and decrease administrative costs in enterprise computing environments, Sun Management Center provides in-depth monitoring and advanced management capabilities for Sun enterprise and volume servers to enhance system performance, reliability, security, and utilization. Key benefits include:
  • Ensures system availability, optimizes performance and scalability, and simplifies the monitoring and management of SPARC(R)and x86-based systems running the Solaris(TM)and Linux operating systems.
  • In-depth monitoring of Sun systems
  • Enhanced reporting of systems data
  • Comprehensive event, fault and alarm management of key system attributes.
  • Store and analyze critical monitored data for better decision making comprehensive online diagnostic testing identifies hardware faults for corrective action.
  • Unique Solaris 10 feature support such as Containers, BrandZ, FMA, and DTrace.
  • Management and monitoring of Solaris Containers as well as reporting and scheduling of the virtualized environment. Through improved resource utilization and streamlined management of containers, it drives cost and complexity out of the data center.
  • Integrates with other enterprise management solutions using standards-based protocol such as SNMP and HTTP to protect current investment. Sun MC can integrate with Tivoli, HP OpenView , CA Unicenter, etc.
  • Client application programming interface (API) allows developers to leverage and integrate with Sun Management Center
  • High-availability failover increases application services uptime. Assures users that the infrastructure is managed with complete data integrity and minimal downtime.
  • Secure management controls for dynamic reconfiguration and domain management.

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2.
Q:
What are the key new features of Sun Management Center latest release, 4.0?
A:
Sun MC continues to focus on providing the most in-depth monitoring and management of Sun systems on Solaris and Linux. New features in Sun MC 4.0 include:
  • Solaris Container Manager enhancements such as physical memory control, swap control, zone configuration, etc.
  • Support of both in-band and out-of-band monitoring
  • Database migration - transition from Oracle database to Postgres
  • Enhanced browser based interface for improved user experience
  • Installer enhancements imply hands free installation.
  • Support of X86/X64 systems on multiple operating platforms

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3.
Q:
What specifically are the enhancements to Solaris Container support?
A:
With this release, users can now take advantage of the new Container enhancement available in Solaris 10 Update 4. Specifically:
  • physical memory control ( memcap ) that can be assigned at zone level
  • swap control again at the zone level.
  • change in the way zones are configured with resource control parameters.
  • CPU control mechanism via caps
  • Branded Zone (BrandZ lifecycle management)

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4.
Q:
How does Sun Management Center fit into Solaris Enterprise System?
A:
Sun created Solaris Enterprise System to remove barrier to software adoption for all customers. Solaris Enterprise System contains enterprise class software that customers can use at no cost.

And when you need assurance and support, Sun offers licensing and service plan for purchase.

Sun Management Center is part of the Solaris Enterprise System. To download Sun Management Center software, go to www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/get.html. To purchase the physical media kits and entitlements, go to www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/get.html.

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5.
Q:
When should I use Sun Management Center and when should I use N1 System Manager?
A:
Sun Management Center:
Sun Management Center provides in-depth monitoring and management of Sun enterprise servers, allowing system administrators to manage their systems more effectively and at a lower cost while improving the service level of their Sun environment.

Sun Management Center can proactively alarm hardware and software fault conditions and offers attributes on which users can set thresholds to launch predetermined activities on the system.

The base product works with other modular components (sold separately) to provide additional deep monitoring, RAS and performance reporting of SPARC and x64 based systems. Further, Sun Management Center can be integrated with customers' existing enterprise management framework to supplement and enhance the operations centers view of their Sun hardware and software stack.

Please visit http://www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/ for more information.

Sun N1 System Manager:
Sun N1 System Manager provides comprehensive infrastructure life-cycle management capabilities for, provisioning monitoring, and managing hundreds of Sun Fire x64 servers and SPARC volume servers.

The application is used for managing large number of Sun volume servers in a horizontally scale environment, such as web server farm. Its easy-to-use hybrid user interface will effectively reduce the repetitive management tasks and the human errors often associated with them, as well as shortening the time it takes to deploy these systems.

Please visit http://www.sun.com/software/products/system_manager/ for more information.

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6.
Q:
What hardware platforms does Sun Management Center support?
A:
To get the latest supported platform information, please read the datasheet document http://www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/ds/datasheet.xml.

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7.
Q:
How have agent deployment and updating been simplified?
A:
The base Sun Management Center agent has been updated to facilitate using JumpStart to deploy this agent. Sun Management Center has an agent update utility for updating in mass Sun Management Center agents. This includes Sun Management Center value packs and patches.

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8.
Q:
How have installation process been simplified?
A:
With a GUI-based installation wizard, the installation procedure is also more platform aware and will install platform specific functionality as required, not by default. There is a validation tool as well to assist with installation.

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9.
Q:
What does it mean for Sun MC to be highly available?
A:
Beyond just improving systems availability, users can gain greater peace of mind by integrating high available services with their systems management solution. Sun MC offers high availability failover of critical server infrastructure by combining Solaris Containers with the Sun Cluster zone agent to bring high availability to Sun server management.

Users are assured that their infrastructure are managed with no loss of data and minimal downtime. Sun MC agents are assured of locating at least one server to communicate with.

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10.
Q:
What training class is available today for Sun Management Center?
A:
The following training class is available for Sun Management Center:

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11.
Q:
What are the other products in the management portfolio?
A:
In addition to Sun MC, the portfolio consists of the following lifecycle management tools for the enterprise or data center:

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