IBM tools for Virtualization

By the  starting of this week, with a set of tools called VMControl, IBM will position itself as the maker of virtualization tools that can span all commercial hypervisors and can manage their VMs across incompatible operating systems and hypervisors. An opportunistic Switzerland, if you will, in the virtual realm.

The VMControl tools will, of course, start with IBM’s own Power and mainframe platforms. According to Scott Handy – vice president of marketing and strategy for the Power Systems division and the person who is also in charge of IBM’s cross-platform Systems Director server management tools – about 60 per cent of IBM’s customers have mainframe, Unix, and x64 servers all in the same data center. And with virtualization being at 100 per cent on mainframes – at around 60 per cent on Unix machines, and rising fast on x64 boxes – they are clamoring for IBM to do something to help them manage the virtual machine sprawl from a single set of tools.

VMControl Express is being launched on July 24 for IBM’s System x and BladeCenter machines using x64 processors and supporting Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX Server hypervisors. It will eventually be available to support PowerVM logical partitions on IBM’s Power-based servers as well as supporting the commercial variants of the Xen hypervisor from Citrix Systems and Oracle and the KVM hypervisor from Red Hat, which are deployed on IBM’s x64 iron.

Systems Director VMControl V2.1 will initially come in three flavors, each of which provides successively more features. Systems Director, which spans all of IBM’s platforms, already has features to allow it to discover and monitor virtual machines (called Virtualization Manager) and storage (called Storage Manager). VMControl Express is a free plug-in that will allow Systems Director to create, modify, and delete virtual machines or hook into live migration and other high availability features inherent in server hypervisors to move running VMs from machine to machine.

VMControl V2.1 Standard Edition adds image management features, similar in concept to the VM jukeboxing that VMware and Citrix Systems are peddling as “lab management” software add-ons to their hypervisors and tool stacks. Standard Edition will initially support the AIX Network Installation Management (NIM) tool, which has been given the job of managing the creation of logical partitions for the PowerVM hypervisor as it has evolved on Power-based servers and will leverage the z/VM virtual machine environment on mainframes.

The z/VM environment is currently only used to support partitions running mainframe Linux. It does not support the management of images for the flagship z/OS mainframe operating system or z/VSE. VMControl Standard Edition will be able to manage AIX and Linux images on Power servers, and Handy says that in the fourth quarter, the plug-in will be able to manage hypervisors on x64 iron, probably starting with ESX Server and Hyper-V and working out from there.

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