For years, customers have asked how they can centrally direct all the systems in their data center from one management tool. System i Navigator (now Navigator for i) is great, but it handles only IBM i operating systems. The Hardware Management Console (HMC) is great, but it pertains just to the hardware and virtual resources for Power Systems. In most Power Systems shops, you need to manage other resources such as AIX, Linux, Windows, and the many virtual environments that exist.

Drum roll to the newly released IBM Systems Director 6.1. Here, I introduce you to a next-generation systems management tool that combines the best of the best designed specifically for you.

What Is IBM Systems Director?

IBM Systems Director helps you manage your data center. It has a web-based user interface as a central point of control. It talks to a management server, which then communicates with all the resources in your data center. You can discover and collect inventory for the systems in your data center, monitor the health and status of your systems, run life-cycle tasks, operate automations based on events triggered from problems, and supervise virtualization, configuration, updates, remote access, and even energy.

You can install IBM Systems Director's management server on Windows, Linux, and AIX but not on IBM i. Customers say they want their management server tools running on separate operating systems from their mission-critical IBM i applications. IBM Systems Director can manage a broad suite of resources, including operating systems such as IBM i, AIX, Windows, and Linux; Power System resources such as HMC, IVM, and VIOS; hardware resources such as Power Systems servers, System x, System z, and BladeCenter; and virtualization technologies such as VMware, MSVS, Xen, z/VM, and even some non-IBM x86 systems. IBM Systems Director also has a command line for composing scripts and for additional automation.

Turn It On

You can easily install and configure IBM Systems Director. As you see in Figure 1, the first thing you find when you log on is the Start tab and the big Discover button. You click the button and then enter the user ID and password known on your managed systems. If you have an LDAP server, IBM Systems Director can access that as well.

After the discovery starts, IBM Systems Director finds the systems in your local subnet, requests access, and collects the inventory (you can discover other subnets in your data center later). For systems with unique admission requirements, you can simply request access for them individually by selecting the "x systems have no access" link next to the lock icon. You can start using IBM Systems Director during the discovery. Navigate Resources, which shows your systems, is a good beginning point.

Join In

After IBM Systems Director discovers your systems, you see the Manage tab in Figure 2 as the default tab when you sign in. Think of this tab as your activity list for the day. Sometimes you might want to manage updates, and other times you might want to direct automation or virtualization. Sometimes you might want to focus on your Power Systems, and other times you might want to concentrate on your BladeCenter systems. No matter what you want to manage, you simply click the link to find that manager's summary page — a view dedicated to a particular activity that helps frame what you can do in one simple experience.

For example, one of your first tasks might be to see how the process of managing updates works in IBM Systems Director. To start, select Update Manager from the Manage tab. The summary view appears as in Figure 3, and you can see which systems you are monitoring for update compliance, view how often IBM Systems Director checks ibm.com for new information, and search for updates that exist in your data center.

Notice the "Getting started" link on the upper right of the page. This is a great example of how IBM Systems Director provides wizards to get the basics going while providing detailed tasks so that you can dive into the functions later. With the "Getting started" wizard, you can check ibm.com for news on any systems you select. Because you can check for firmware and driver updates for Power Systems, HMCs, System x's, and BladeCenters as well as IBM i, Linux, and AIX operating system updates, you can pick all systems that are important to you and find missing updates with just a few clicks. When IBM Systems Director finds new updates, it notifies you via the compliance status (shown in this summary page and also as a column on any system list). If you see a system that has a compliance issue, you can use IBM Systems Director to install the update. In addition, IBM Systems Director manages its own updates.

The Learn tab on the welcome page is filled with tutorials to help you get to know IBM Systems Director and understand some of its key concepts. After you walk through these tutorials, you're ready to unleash the full power available.

Navigate and Find Your Systems

A variety of common behaviors make IBM Systems Director operate efficiently as it finds and navigates data center resources. The Navigate Resources option shows a number of predefined groups of systems. Although many such groups exist, IBM Systems Director arranges them in a way that simplifies your experience. Think of these groups as a browsing mechanism — Groups by System Type|Operating Systems|IBM i Systems is one example. Another reason for adding these predefined groups is that if you select Find a Resource, you can search on common words such as HMC, AIX, VIOS, and IBM i. The first group you might want to drill into is All Systems.

When you view the list of systems in a table, you see many relevant columns of information as well as the status of the system. At the top of the table is a search bar that looks for all visible columns for the string fragment you enter. It could be "AIX" to find a system with that operating system on it, "128.45" to find all systems whose IP addresses starts with those numbers, or even "sys34" to find all host names that contain sys34. Feel free to customize the columns. This ability lets you optimize the search for the data you want.

You can click the system name anytime to see its properties and find out what's really wrong. As you see in Figure 4, several tabs provide helpful information about the system:

General: View overall information about the system. Edit common items such as the name and description. This tab also contains the properties callout box that holds other properties such as virtualization and location details.

Active Status: View all active problems and compliance issues with this system.

Applied Activities: View any scheduled, running, or completed job. This tab also shows thresholds and automation plans that have been applied to the system.

Configuration: View realtime configuration settings and save them as a configuration template.

Event Log: View events generated from the system.

Inventory: View this system's inventory.

When you right-click the system name from any table, topology map, or property, a context menu appears showing all the authorized (depending on role-based security) tasks you can perform on that system.

IBM Systems Director can show a topology map of all the related resources of a particular system. The topology perspectives include Basic, Network, Storage, Storage Area Network, Updates, Virtualization Basic, Virtualization Common, and Virtualization Detail. The one you choose depends on how you want to view the relationships between the system you are targeting and other resources. These perspectives can be handy in troubleshooting the real source of a problem.

Check Health, Status, and Automation

One primary focus of IBM Systems Director is managing the health and status of your systems. The better IBM Systems Director monitors and informs you of problems, the better you can fix them and the more meaningful automations you can create. Status Manager and Automation Manager are the two plug-ins included in IBM Systems Director that help here.

The Health Summary in Figure 5 is a customizable workspace in which you have a bird's-eye view of your whole data center's health. The scoreboard in the upper left shows all the problems and compliance issues in your data center. The two entries acknowledge that a compliance issue — a system missing recent updates — is not the same as a hardware problem or an exceeded threshold. If you click the Problems link, you see all the problems in the data center. This is a great way to put together a to-do list — fix these issues first and then move on to other things.

The dashboard in Figure 5 lets you display in a graph any realtime data being monitored from a system or group of systems. As an example, the first graph shows performance data such as CPU utilization from your physical servers, the next displays CPU utilization from your guest operating systems, and the one after that reveals the number of jobs running in your IBM i instance. You can add any numeric monitor from the view to the dashboard. You can create larger graphs by simply clicking the name of the gauge.

Beneath the dashboard is a collection of small tables or thumbnails showing the contents of any group you might be interested in. IBM Systems Director shows the two groups Favorites and Systems with Problems by default, but you can select, for example, HMC and Managed Power Systems, IBM i Systems, or even a custom group you define. Click the name of the thumbnail to see the whole group with all the columns, or click the name of the system to see its properties.

The ability to view all monitors on a managed system is an additional key piece of status management. The actual monitors may differ per platform, but there are dozens to choose from. You can activate thresholds on any of these monitors, and the result can be an event logged that the threshold exceeded.

The final goal, of course, is to fix the problem. The Automation Manager can help. The Automation Plan wizard can create the most common automation plans. The wizard walks you through selecting the systems you want to pay attention to, the events to look for, and finally the action to run if those events appear in the event log. The wizard lists common events and even offers to create thresholds for CPU Utilization, Memory Usage, and Disk % Space Used. It also asks when you would like the automation plan to pay attention. Maybe you don't care if utilization is less than 20 percent during evening hours. You can also compose advanced plans if you need them. The point is that you can set thresholds on what you want, view status details from the health summary, and use automation plans to notify or run tasks.

Virtualize

Learning how to better manage physical and virtual environments is another primary focus of IBM Systems Director. Because the Virtualization Manager plug-in is built right into IBM Systems Director, you can optimize the views and tasks for both physical and virtual environments.

For example, if you click Find a Resource, you can search for physical resources such as Hardware Management Console. If you type HMC, a predefined group displays in the list (Figure 6). By clicking the link, you find not only the list of HMCs but also the physical servers the HMC manages and the virtual servers contained in each physical server. Additionally, if you want to view the internal virtual layout, you can right-click the physical server, select Topology Perspectives|Virtualization Common, and get a topology map filled with the resources that make the whole virtual environment run.

The resulting window shows details such as HMC, physical server, virtual servers, a VIO server, virtual disks, physical disks, and VLANs. For each resource, you can view the properties in the details palette, see the status, or right-click to run tasks on any of the resources. If you spot a problem on one virtual server, you can edit the virtual resources for that single virtual server or for the entire host. By selecting Edit Host, you can manage virtual disks and get a bird's-eye view of the virtual servers for editing processing and memory. If you revise the virtual resources on a single virtual server, you can also assign physical resources such as a DVD drive.

As an example, select the Virtual Servers and Hosts view from the inventory category in the navigation area. From this view, you see all your hosts and all virtual servers contained in the host, but this time it's for all platforms. This one view identifies HMC, IVM, VMware, Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, and z/VM hosts and virtual servers. The view also reveals the current CPU utilization, allocated processor, and allocated memory for all hosts and virtual servers. This helps you determine which host has available processing for an additional virtual server.

If you need to perform an advanced task on a Power Systems server, you don't have to break your concentration and walk to your HMC. Instead, IBM Systems Director has integrated all the tasks for the HMC so that you simply right-click the physical server and select Extended Management. After the task runs, the correct remote HMC launches right to that task. IBM Systems Director supports single sign-on so that the remote web UI opens seamlessly.

Integrate OS Management

With IBM Systems Director, you can integrate your operating system management. You can check operating system resources from the monitor task, keep an eye on the processes themselves (Manage Processes), and run commands (Command Definitions) and tasks optimized for your particular operating system.

For IBM i, a popular starting point is the Power Systems Management summary page (Figure 7), which focuses on all things related to Power Systems. This page was inspired by customers who wondered how useful IBM Systems Director would be for just one platform.

The status section shows whether problems exist in any Power System resource. If all is well, you can focus on a particular type of resource in the Manage section. For example, you can select IBM i under operating systems and view all your IBM i systems. From there, you can view each operating system's status and columns of data or right-click to get to all the IBM Systems Director tasks available.

Additionally, you can access integrated links to the Navigator for i tasks (the embedded web console that runs on every instance of IBM i). From here, you can right-click, select IBM i Management|Work Management, and launch the remote Navigator for i console via single sign-on to open the Work Management task. From there, you can spend time on server jobs, change the priorities of the jobs, manage users, and assess security and performance.

IBM Systems Director also integrates the embedded AIX console tasks for extending AIX operating system management. From the Power Systems Management summary page, select "AIX systems" under the operating systems category just as you did with the IBM i systems. From here, right-click an operating system to select the AIX web console to launch. One new task in the AIX console is the health task, which shows system configuration values and graphs of key performance metrics, as well as the top processes and file systems in use.

Watch for Advanced Managers

IBM Systems Director aims to provide optional advanced plug-ins to help in key areas of your data center. IBM will gradually introduce additions on its website as they become available. Active Energy Manager is one to watch for. It is an optional plug-in that lets you view, monitor, direct, and even automate your energy management. For example, you can select a system and observe the trend data of the wattage used. If you don't like the maximum power cap value setting, you can simply manage the energy of the resource by selecting Power Capping, which can change the maximum power cap value in absolute values or percentages.

Because Active Energy Manager plugs directly in to IBM Systems Director, you can see additional monitor views, columns, and groups, and you can create automation plans that call energy-management tasks so that your data center uses the least energy possible.

Stay Tuned

This is just a fly-by of what IBM Systems Director provides. As you can see, it is a whole new suite of optimized functions for managing Power Systems. I'll go into detail on many of the key features in future articles.

Greg Hintermeister works at IBM as a user interaction designer and is an IBM master inventor. He has extensive experience designing user interaction for IBM’s systems management and virtualization products, wireless applications, and numerous web applications. Greg is a regular speaker at user groups and technical conferences.