IBM Creates Virtualization Dashboard, Merges Server and Storage Management

Published: November 7, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just about everyone in the server, operating system, and server virtualization hypervisor racket has come to the conclusion that hypervisors will be commoditized soon--if not already--and that the real differentiation in the market--and hence the money--will come from the tools that manage virtualized server and storage resources. This is why IBM is working on merging its Director server management tools and its TotalStorage Productivity Center, the equivalent tool for its storage arrays. The first product to come out of this united effort is a tool called the Virtualization Manager.

Virtualization Manager is a Web-based dashboard that system administrators will be able to use to manage various kinds of logical and virtual machine hypervisors on their servers. Initially, Virtualization Manager can cope with the Virtualization Engine hypervisor that is built into the Power-based System i and System p servers from Big Blue and the z/VM-derived partitions on Integrated Linux Facility partitions on mainframes. The dashboard tool can also be used to manage Xen virtual machine hypervisors on X86 and X64 servers as well as Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine instances within Windows and VMware's ESX Server and VMware Server hypervisors--the former being the high-end, bare-metal hypervisor for providing isolated partitions akin to Virtualization Engine, and the latter being the freebie VMware hypervisor that runs inside of a Linux or Windows operating system as it supports multiple X86 and X64 operating systems inside guest partitions.

IBM is merging its server, storage, and other Tivoli tools together and launching the Virtualization Manager dashboard as an add-on to them for a simple reason. "While a lot of customers have data centers that are smarter, this isn't getting easier," says Pete McCaffrey, director of virtualization strategy at IBM. "Customers have gotten away with using many tools now because they are only putting their toes in the water using point products. But as they roll out virtualization more broadly, this approach becomes a problem."

And so, IBM is working to make its various tools work together and easier to use. The resulting Systems Director product will be modular, including software to provision storage and servers, manage virtualized servers, monitor how they are running, and proactively manage these resources. The Director product, which now manages approximately 1.25 million servers in the world today, was originally created for IBM's X86 and X64 servers, and was extended to its BladeCenter blade servers and, in recent years, has been further extended to cover its System i servers, which run i5/OS mostly but also supports Linux and AIX in partitions, and its System p servers, which support AIX and Linux. Director can also be used to manage non-IBM servers, with the proper tweaks. The TotalStorage Productivity Center is tool for managing IBM, Hitachi, and EMC disk arrays as well as IBM's TotalStorage Volume Controller, which is a storage virtualization appliance. Systems Director will eventually allow Tivoli products to snap into it as well.

McCaffrey says that IBM has made multi-million dollar investments in virtualization management to create the Systems Director product, which is really an amalgam of existing and new products. The Virtualization Manager dashboard was created by a team of programmers working at IBM development labs in the United States, Israel, and Mexico.

Rather than give absolute numbers of virtual and logical machines running on its iron, IBM supplied a hodge-podge of statistics to convey some impression of how virtualization is helping to sell systems and therefore compel the creation of an integrated set of physical and virtual management tools like it is creating with the Systems Director lineup. All of IBM's mainframes ship with some form of server virtualization--often, these machines have more than one kind, in fact. About 82 percent of the high-end System i5 595 servers (which span up to 64 processors) shipped in 2005 had logical partitions, but this is arguably a very small number since only a few hundred i5 595s ship each year. IBM says that more than 10,000 System p5 machines shipped in 2005 had the Virtualization Engine software on it and activated. IBM says further that customers buying System x servers today create an aggregate of 1,000 virtual machines a day, and that its engagements with customers on X86 and X64 iron to virtualize servers doubled in 2005. The company says that over 2,500 Blue shops are using a mix of IBM and non-IBM tools to virtualize their storage. Perhaps the most interesting statistic is also the vaguest: IBM claims that it has the tools to virtualize more than 80 percent of the IT infrastructure running at its customers' data centers or in their departments.

Of course, what IBM wants is for all of its customers to just use Systems Director and to use its products as much as possible. Ease of management can drive sales--and the AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 product lines as well as the mainframe have been testaments to this idea. Legacy application lock in is not the only reason people stick with these platforms. IBM has created sophisticated systems that manage multiple workloads on the same box--and do it with a certain amount of grace. There is real value in this.

While IBM needs to work with tools like Virtual Center today, that is not the long-run plan. For instance, the Virtualization Manager dashboard can also wrap around VMware's VirtualCenter management tool, if customers want to use that software's features without actually leaving the IBM tool. Right now, the Virtualization Manager needs some features in Virtual Center to operate, but over time McCaffrey expects for the dependency on Virtual Center to go away. Similarly, IBM expects that iSeries Navigator, the management tool that IBM created for its OS/400 and i5/OS platform, will eventually hook into Systems Director and the Virtualization Manager dashboard.