Some customers expanded the use of their dedicated systems and consequently model more business processes. This often caused an increased number of dedicated systems that were used and a stronger demand on flexibility. In addition, the life cycle of these systems differed extremely. Renaming, removal, and deletion became more and more common system administration tasks.
In 2001, the pSeries hardware technology with logical partitioning was generally available. Logical partitioning creates the ability to define the logical partitions (LPARs) that are adapted to customer needs regarding the number of processors, assigned memory, and I/O adapters: no waste of resources, but the flexibility to assign the right power at the right moment. The
Partitions with associated physical resources or virtual resources are not different from a collection of
Today, server consolidation is a must for many IT sites. Minimized TCO and complexity, with the maximum amount of flexibility, is a crucial goal of nearly all customers. LPARs enable flexible distribution of resources with LPAR boundaries. Each logical partition can be configured according to the specific needs of the occupant application. LPARs provide a protection boundary between the systems. More test and development systems can exist on the same server in separate partitions.
CSM value points
The CSM allows the management of different hardware platforms from a single point of control, and it has consistent interfaces to manage systems and logical partitions that are running both AIX and Linux. Management is achieved across multiple switch and interconnect topologies. PSSP forced system administrators to do some things a certain way (such as NIM, and SP user management). The CSM provides assistance in setting these things up, but enables system administrators to tailor their systems to their own needs, and it has the ability to manage systems across different geographical sites.
Monitoring is much easier to use, and the system administrator can monitor all of the network interfaces, not just the switch and administrative interfaces. The management server pushes information out to the nodes, which releases the management server from having to trust the node. In addition, the nodes do not have to be
The CSM ships with AIX itself (a
CSM V1.4 on AIX and Linux (planned 4Q04)
The CSM V1.4 on AIX and Linux introduces an optional IBM CSM High Availability Management Server (HA MS) feature, which is designed to allow automated failover of the CSM management server to a backup management server. In addition, sample scripts for setting up NTP1, and network tuning (AIX ONLY) configurations, and the capability to copy files across nodes or node groups in the cluster can improve cluster ease of use and site customization.
1Network Time Protocol
