Optimize Virtual Servers Dynamically With IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager

Server virtualization has transformed enterprise-class datacenters. By deploying multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, enterprises have dramatically improved server resource utilization while reducing operational costs such as energy consumption—thus leaving the datacenter a more flexible instrument of business strategy than ever before.

With the many business benefits of virtualization, however, come a host of new complexities. Since virtual servers are no longer linked with physical servers on a one-to-one basis, monitoring and managing them is no simple task; system administrators must stay continually aware of which virtual servers are on which physical servers, tracking performance at both logical and physical levels regardless of changes that may take place across the IT infrastructure. And when you consider the subtleties involved in more abstract forms of IT management, such as measuring the uptime of core IT services which span multiple virtual servers running on multiple physical hosts, the challenge appears greater than ever.

Organizations looking for a way to simplify those complexities, and extract the maximum possible business value from virtualized servers, should consider IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM). TPM can distribute any form of software, from individual data files to complete installations including operating systems, applications, and middleware, to any logical system on the network—whether it's a physical server or a hosted virtual environment. And because TPM can be automated via scripts and prepared disk images, and includes server-level discovery, monitoring, and management in a single elegant interface, it also helps increase IT agility and responsiveness.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Can Enhance Virtual Server Flexibility and Improve Service Visualization

For instance, consider the question of server flexibility. Physical servers must frequently be partitioned and repartitioned with virtual servers in order to accommodate changing business needs, and this process, if handled manually, can be enormously time-consuming and operationally expensive. For each new virtual server, a logical partition must be created on the designated host; a virtual machine must be created and configured within it; and many types of software must be installed and configured within that virtual machine.

Such a task is ideal for TPM because it can be completely automated—speeding time-to-solution and freeing key IT staff to attend to other, more complex tasks. Furthermore, inadvertent errors which might occur in a complex manual installation process can be eliminated; this means that virtual servers are not only more quickly deployed, but more accurately deployed.

A second business win comes from TPM's improved visualization of the connection between server deployment and business functionality. Many enterprise-class datacenters involve more than a thousand different physical servers, and many of those will be running multiple virtual servers. In such a complex infrastructure, it can be difficult to track exactly which virtual servers are responsible for performing which IT services, let alone optimize them for highest business value.

Toward ameliorating that problem, TPM delivers automated tracking features. These allow network managers to determine on which physical servers different virtual servers are deployed, what software they have, and (as a result) where the opportunity exists to create new virtual servers or reconfigure old virtual servers for higher performance. And because TPM also includes out-of-the-box workflows based on industry best practices, that business intelligence is easily translated into real-world results.

Higher ROI through Elegant Interoperability and Improved Service Levels
Maximizing the return on IT investment, for instance, is a real-world result that will appeal to virtually any CIO. Enterprise datacenters are often challenged to fulfill new business initiatives within the confines of limited budgets. Yet, through virtualization-based strategies, this problem often turns out to have an elegant solution because those datacenters may have hidden resources which are undiscovered or underutilized by current solutions or IT staff.

Achieving target service levels in such a case, then, is not a question of spending money on new hardware, or chartering already-busy IT personnel with new tasks, but rather, getting the most out of the hardware already in place by dynamically modifying it through virtual server deployment or configuration—and both of these goals can easily be achieved through TPM. Imagine, for example, that a physical server turns out to have unexpectedly high idle time. TPM can automatically provision a new virtual server to it, thus improving IT service levels and business resilience without generating new costs in the form of either new hardware or the direct attention of IT staff.

Of course, a software provisioning solution will need to be as interoperable as possible with other IT tools in order to deliver ideal flexibility and performance. In the example above, for instance, TPM will require some mechanism by which to track storage space for new virtual servers; otherwise, it has no way to know that sufficient space will be available. Fortunately, TPM integrates elegantly with many other leading IT solutions, such as IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, to acquire exactly this kind of functionality. TotalStorage Productivity Center manages and provides storage dynamically, not as a literal resource which is tied to a particular server, but as a virtual resource which can be meted out in accordance with business needs.

In this way, the two IBM solutions can work in concert to address a business requirement by capitalizing on available resources already in the IT infrastructure. A new virtual server is provisioned on a host computer by TPM, and the storage it will require is similarly provisioned by TotalStorage Productivity Center. As the server takes on workloads, end users experience higher performance and reduced lag time for the associated IT service, yet this improvement does not require them in any way to change how they access those services. And should the business requirement for that service diminish over time, the process can be reversed with comparable ease. TPM can remove the virtual server from its host, and TotalStorage Productivity Center can return the associated storage to the general pool.

Furthermore, technical gains of this type are only part of the overall business win delivered by TPM. Because the datacenter is, through improved virtualization solutions, rendered a more flexible overall tool in the pursuit of business goals, many big-picture IT initiatives are enabled and enhanced as well. Business processes intended to deliver improved IT governance, for instance, are more easily and comprehensively fulfilled because relevant servers can be more quickly installed and configured to support them. Compliance with internal security policies or external government regulations is similarly enhanced.

TPM, in short, delivers a host of leading features and functionality, viewed from both business and technological perspectives, which integrate with almost any enterprise-class IT infrastructure to create, configure, and manage virtualized servers in the most efficient possible way—for optimal business value.

Optimize Virtual Servers Dynamically With IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
Managing a complex datacenter is trickier than ever in an era of virtual servers. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager can help by empowering systems managers to easily create, configure and monitor virtual servers, adjusting them dynamically to suit changing business requirements.