Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 goes live, but lacks VM provisioning |
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By Alex Barrett, News Director
19 Feb 2008 | SearchDataCenter.com |
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Two months after the official announcement, Sun xVM Ops Center, a systems management tool, is generally available for purchase.
Despite the xVM name, which it shares with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s virtualization family, Sun xVM Ops Center isn't virtualization related per se. As the "love child" of Sun N1 System Manager (Sun N1SM) and Sun Connection, acquired from Aduva in 2006, xVM Ops Center is primarily a systems management tool that focuses on discovery, provisioning, patch management, monitoring and reporting, said Oren Teich, Sun director of product management and marketing for xVM.
And in fact, with version 1.0, xVM Ops Center does not yet support provisioning on virtual machines; that functionality will have to wait until version 2.0, slated for this summer. Likewise, while xVM Ops Center can provision Solaris, Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux operating systems, it can't do Windows yet.
But for large Sun-based shops, xVM Ops Center might be just the thing. In addition to its ability to provision select operating systems, the tool can provision firmware to Sun hardware, Teich explained. That's come in handy at , Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a bleeding-edge Sun shop with upward of 1,500 nodes of Sun systems. "They're using things like our new C48 [42U blade] chassis and the [Sun Datacenter Switch 346] InfiniBand Magnum switch, and as part of that, sometimes you need to update the firmware," he said. Without xVM ops Center's firmware provisioning feature, "that can be a nightmare, frankly."
Sun xVM Ops Center is available immediately and is sold on a subscription basis. A satellite server is priced at $10,000 per year, while agents for managed servers are priced at $100 to $350 per year, depending on required functionality.
Let us know what you think about the story; email: Alex Barrett, News Director.
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