IBM Service Management and Virtualization

Manage virtualized environments, reduce infrastructure costs and improve efficiency with IBM Service Management.

Virtualization continues to change the way people and organizations compute, moving beyond server virtualization across the entire infrastructure from servers to desktops, storage to networks, and applications to management software. All components of the infrastructure are now in play for IT managers to consider as they weigh their virtualization management strategies for their data centers.

IBM understands enterprise virtualization and the vital role it plays in building and managing a dynamic infrastructure—but to deliver on this vision requires deploying new and enhanced management capabilities to take full advantage of the dynamic, scalable, and flexible nature of the virtual environments deployed. This is where IBM Service Management excels.

IBM Service Management—key to reducing cost and delivering quality services in a virtualized environment

IBM Service Management delivers the visibility, control and automation to you need to effectively manage your virtualized environment, enabling you to deliver quality services, mitigate risks, and achieve operational cost savings.

Visibility

One of the biggest challenges virtualization presents is the difficulty of managing a virtual infrastructure layered over a physical infrastructure. In virtualized environments, it can be difficult to clearly identify where services, applications, and data reside, and to understand how they all work together.

IBM Service Management helps you discover and visualize – enabling you to monitor the health and relationship of your business services and IT components across your physical and virtual environment.

Featured Offerings

• IBM Application Performance Management
  Provides enhanced visibility into application performance—giving organizations the power to understand both when and why performance has degraded, and the information needed to improve matters in a business-prioritized fashion.
• IBM SmartCloud Monitoring
  Helps pro-actively plan capacity and maximize the density of virtual environment, ensures high availability of critical workloads with easier problem determination and resolution.
• Tivoli Business Service Manager
  Delivers advanced real-time visualization of services and processes to help organizations monitor and measure service availability and performance against defined revenue, growth and operational objectives.

Control

IT departments face unparalleled pressure to control costs, improve service and manage risk. When virtual IT resources are shared by applications and users it can be challenging to manage resource access, usage, and cost.

IBM Service Management delivers the control you need to effectively manage and secure the investments in business and technology assets and processes that your organization relies upon.

• IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB)
  Tracks IT assets, relationships, configuration and changes in the IT infrastructure. Through the integration, automation and optimization of data, workflows and policies, Tivoli CCMDB helps align the ongoing management of your IT infrastructure with your business priorities — while helping to eliminate the complexity of managing the virtual infrastructure.
• IBM Tivoli Usage & Accounting Manager
  Helps to improve IT cost management of shared computing resources through the ability to track, allocate and invoice based on actual resource use by department, user and other criteria.
• IBM Tivoli License Compliance Manager
  Helps manage software costs and license compliance for software applications running in virtualized environments

Automation

When virtualization combines with automation, true flexibility, resiliency and responsiveness become a reality. For physical and virtual systems alike, the automation of critical operations is crucial for ensuring availability, providing efficient service and reducing manual errors, cost and complexity.

Manual provisioning of hardware and software is a time consuming and cumbersome process. A virtualized IT infrastructure drives requirements for tools to properly coordinate the physical and virtual environments. IBM Service Management delivers automation to optimize management efficiencies associated with deployment, fulfillment, change and release management, and other operational tasks. Tivoli software offers automation solutions designed to address key types of automation, including provisioning, workload, storage and availability.

Featured Offerings

• Tivoli Provisioning Manager
  Provides end-to-end automation capabilities for physical servers, virtual servers, software, storage devices and network devices.
• System Storage SAN Volume Controller
  A disk storage virtualization system designed to help customers reduce storage costs and improve efficiency.
• Tivoli Storage Productivity Center
  A suite of storage infrastructure management tools that can help customers reduce the complexity of managing their storage environments by centralizing, simplifying and automating storage tasks associated with storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management.
• Tivoli Workload Automation
  Dynamically brokers workloads to best available virtual resources while resolving cross-workload and physical resource dependencies, and dynamically adapt workload execution to incidences, problems and configuration changes in the underlying virtual and physical IT infrastructure.
• Tivoli System Automation
  Delivers advanced policy-based automation capabilities to help reduce the frequency and duration of service disruptions and enable high availability of critical applications and middleware running in a heterogeneous and virtual IT environment.
• IBM® Systems Director VMControl™
  Helps you gain more from infrastructure wide virtualization, with a deeper level of management.
• IBM PowerVM
  PowerVM provides a secure and scalable virtualization environment for AIX, i and Linux applications built upon the advanced RAS features and leading performance of the Power Systems platform.

 

Benefits of Virtualization Management with Tivoli software

Reduce Costs

• Address the complexity of managing the virtual infrastructure.
• Improve usage and accounting management of shared IT resources
• Optimize the utilization of existing resources to reduce operational overhead and avoid data center upgrade or replacement
• Migrate data and automate space management in virtual and physical environments
• Deploy and deprovision virtual resources automatically in response to fluctuations in demand
• Reduce operational cost with standardization of middleware, applications, and business policies

Improve Service

• Rapidly deploy new services and production environments
• Integrate management and problem resolution across physical and virtual resources
• Maintain library of images that can be loaded to improve the quality of the deployment
• Enable a single central location for application updates
• Dynamically broker workload to best available virtual resource

Lower Risk

• Track IT assets, relationships, configuration and changes in the infrastructure
• Improve security in virtual shared environments
• Enable high availability of critical applications and middleware running in a heterogeneous and virtual IT environment

Analyst Report

Read Gartner's insights on virtualization (530KB)

Virtualization Mgmt

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