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Controlling Your Environment

How to optimize your Power Systems with VMControl V2.2

 

Managing an IT infrastructure using virtualization not only helps organizations gain better control of their environments but can also help cut costs while keeping in line with business objectives.

IBM Systems Director supports the PowerVM environment and is the IBM management tool for multiple, heterogeneous servers. The tool offers advanced management functions, such as workload lifecycle management, health check and topology mappings, and has the capability to take action on monitored events.

As an IBM Systems Director plug-in option, VMControl V2.2 represents a transformation from managing virtualization to using virtualization to better manage an entire IT infrastructure. Together, they’re designed to help reduce the total cost of ownership in a virtual environment by decreasing management costs, increasing asset utilization and linking infrastructure performance to business goals.

VMControl is available in three editions to suit the varying levels of virtualization deployment at client sites:

• VMControl Express Edition provides basic virtual machine lifecycle management.
• VMControl Standard Edition adds the capability to manage complete libraries of virtual images by capturing information from active systems and storing it in a repository as reusable virtual images.
• VMControl Enterprise Edition creates system pools—dynamic collections of computing resources used to support multiple virtual images running concurrently—and lets users manage virtual workloads in them.

VMControl’s advanced virtualization management capabilities provide a pathway for organizations to build sophisticated cloud-computing environments.

Among the many features of VMControl V2.2 is an improved Performance Summary view, which displays more than 25 real-time Power Systems monitors for all types of hosts, virtual servers and operating systems. An important feature is that the Performance Summary view shows related resources together in the table to reflect how virtual resources are being utilized.

This article focuses on monitors available for Power Systems, which are obtained using either an HMC- or IVM-managed system.

The Performance Summary view comes standard with IBM Systems Director 6.1.2; however, only a minimal set of monitors are provided. When you install any version of VMControl V2.2, you’ll have access to a much larger set of monitors. The display tool provides a way of showing multiple live data monitors for a selected set of systems or servers. The monitors are grouped on pages in the user interface, which, depending on the monitors being shown, are labeled “Processor” for all processor-related monitors, “Memory” for all memory-related monitors, “Network” for all network-related monitors and so on. Because a large number of monitors are available in VMControl V2.2, this grouping helps to logically organize the data.

You can launch the Performance Summary view from any of these places in IBM Systems Director:

• Power Systems Summary page
• Status and health category in the navigation pane on the left side of the main page
• Virtual Servers and Hosts view
• Monitors view

 

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