IBM Preps Update to Virtualization Manager

Published: September 18, 2007

by Alex Woodie

The upcoming release of Systems Director Virtualization Manager version 1.2 from IBM will allow System i shops to manage and control virtual machines created with a variety of virtualization solutions, including VMware ESX Server, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, and Xen's XenSource offering, from a single location. The only catch: It controls only AIX and Linux virtualization on the System i, not native i5/OS logical partitioning (LPAR).

Last week, IBM announced that on September 28, Systems Director Virtualization Manager for AIX and Linux on POWER 1.2 will become available. The software, which is available as a free add-on to IBM Director, allows administrators to create, deploy, and relocate virtual machines across a variety of physical machines running a variety of operating systems.

IBM sought to make virtual machine management easy with Virtualization Manager, so it gave it a Web interface. With it, administrators can see the relationships between physical and virtual systems, including information about server and storage relationships, virtual allocations and settings, virtual disk, logical volumes, and virtual SCSI. By providing this information in an easy-to-digest Web format, IBM hopes that administrators will make better decisions.

With Virtualization Manager 1.2, IBM has added a new Virtual Image Management extension that provides a "single, unified view of all types of system templates and server images to help easily deploy new physical or virtual servers." The software, which starts at $119 per server, supports multiple types of image repositories. i5/OS LPAR is not one of them, unfortunately.

IBM is also prepping Systems Director Virtualization Manager for x86 version 1.2, which will provide X86- and X64-based Windows and Linux servers with the same sorts of virtualization tricks that Systems Director Virtualization Manager provides for POWER-based systems--except for i5/OS-based POWER systems, of course.

While i5/OS LPAR isn't supported, that doesn't mean System i users are left entirely high and dry when it comes to defining, configuring, and managing their LPAR. For an additional fee, users can license the IBM Availability Management product, which allows Virtualization Manager users to open IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) to control the Virtualization Engine hypervisor that controls i5/OS LPAR.

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