Hot on the heels of the System p AVE beta, is news we’ve opened up the beta program for the IBM Virtualization Manager 1.2.
The Virtualization Manager helps manage both physical and virtualization resources for the IBM Systems Director. This beta release specifically deals with the resources and relationships that can be managed from the Hardware Management Console (HMC), Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) and Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).
The new release also includes enhanced storage integration and wizards for the creation & modification of virtual servers for POWER, as well as well as setup and deployment of select Xen environments and provides for system templates.
Perhaps more interestingly, two new major extensions/functions are included, the Image Manager and Availability Manager. Image Manager offers image management, creation and cloning for select server systems, and Availability Manager offers relocation and continuous availability on select server systems.
[Edit 5/2/07] If you’d like to participate, please discuss with your IBM rep. or comment here and I’ll make sure the comment is passed on to the enrollment coordinator.
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One reason I’d love to see an comprehensive system cloning tool for AIX is the ability to do a full clone when you’re experiencing a problem on a production system, so you can then attempt fixes on the cloned test environment.
If the clone was quick, and flash copy for the disk subsystem was used, you could very rapidly (under an hour?) build an entire copy of your broken production system which you could then sit down with IBM, Oracle, SAP, or whoever else, and try out each suggested fix 1 after the other until you discovered the root cause.
You could then apply only the “correct” fix to your production environment, and have a much cleaner system going forward that one with perhaps dozens of “Oh can you just upgrade this”, “Apply this fix”, or “Just change that variable” requests being cumulatively applied.