XVM Ops Center - Sun System Management Reinvented
Posted by Steve Putre on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 @ 09:02 PM
Anyone who has managed the Solaris operating system knows that Solaris patch and update management has historically been a time-consuming, anxiety-provoking, and sometimes frustrating process. What has made Solaris patching painful? Let's dig up some bad memories...
- You had to spend hours reading README files, trying to figure out patch dependencies, special install instructions, and system requirements.
- You needed to download every possible patch from Sunsolve, copy them to every server, and attempt to install all of them on your systems, only to have the systems tell you that a good percentage of them are not applicable either because the corresponding package does not exist or the patch is already up-to-date.
- You had to schedule hours of downtime to patch your systems, and in many cases had to manually bring your systems into single-user mode just to add patches
The key to an efficient patching process is active knowledge. For the past three years, Sun has maintained a database of dependencies for every patch and package released not only by Sun, but also by RedHat Enterprise Linux and Suse SLES. Every patch which is released by these vendors is, within a day or two of its release, vetted and entered into a database which tracks all of the patch's dependents, dependencies, and requirements. The vetting process goes beyond the contents of the README file and reaches down to the level of each binary and library in the patch bundles to determine dependencies, conflicts, and requirements.
So Sun has done our patch research for us! How do we get our hands on this knowledge? Answer: Sun's XVM Ops Center (XVMOC) product. Ops Center has been evolving for a number of years now, starting with Sun's aquisition of Aduva and its OnStage product. This evolved into Sun Update Connection, and then to XVM Ops Center 1.0. XVMOC is now in its 2.1 release, with version 2.5 due to be released in the fall of this year.
Having spent much of my career managing, installing, and upgrading Solaris systems, it is clear that XVMOC 2.1 represents a new emphasis on systems management for Sun. It makes the process of patching and upgrading systems much easier and faster than ever before, by:
- Applying patches to many hosts simultaneously
- Determining in advance which patches need to be applied, downloading only the necessary ones from Sun, and copying only necessary packages to each individual host
- Providing the ability to perform dry-runs to reduce the chances of a problem during the patch process
- Enabling quick and clean rollback of any changes to a system
- Support of Sun-recommended and customer-custom patch baselines
Compared to many past products, the browser-based GUI is polished and easy to navigate. The core functionality of managing and installing patches has been augmented by a long list of additional features and capabilities, particularly:
- Bare-metal provisioning of Solaris, Redhat RHEL, and Suse SLES operating systems on Sun and non-Sun hardware.
- Ability to perform firmware upgrades on Sun servers
- Deep monitoring of Sun hardware, ala SunMC
- Direct communication with Sun ALOM, ILOM, and XSCF service processors
- Ability to provision arbitrary products, packages, and scripts onto Solaris, RHEL, and SLES systems
- Tracking of system capacity parameters such as historical CPU, memory, and filesystem usage
- Management of Sun Logical Domains (LDOMS)
XVMOC can integrate with various Enterprise Systems Management platforms, such as Openview, Netcool, and EMC Smarts through the use of Halcyon's Neuron integration module. System alerts captured by XVMOC can be forwarded to the ESM for action.
In future releases, XVMOC will have the ability to perform full lifecycle management of Solaris Containers. Stay tuned for more information.