IBM Systems Director

Use this information to understand how IBM Systems Director works with the blade server.

IBM Systems Director is a platform-management foundation that streamlines the way you manage physical and virtual systems in a heterogeneous environment.

By using industry standards, IBM Systems Director supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies in IBM and non-IBM x86 platforms.

Through a single user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for viewing managed systems, determining how these systems relate to one another, and identifying their statuses, helping to correlate technical resources with business needs. A set of common tasks that are included with IBM Systems Director provides many of the core capabilities that are required for basic management, which means instant out-of-the-box business value. These common tasks include discovery, inventory, configuration, system health, monitoring, updates, event notification, and automation for managed systems.

The IBM Systems Director web and command-line interfaces provide a consistent interface that is focused on driving these common tasks and capabilities:

• Discovering, navigating, and visualizing systems on the network with the detailed inventory and relationships to the other network resources
• Notifying users of problems that occur on systems and the ability to isolate sources of the problems
• Notifying users when systems need updates and distributing and installing updates on a schedule
• Analyzing real-time data for systems and setting critical thresholds that notify the administrator of emerging problems
• Configuring settings of a single system and creating a configuration plan that can apply those settings to multiple systems
• Updating installed plug-ins to add new features and functions to the base capabilities
• Managing the life cycles of virtual resources

For more information about IBM Systems Director, see the documentation at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/topic/diricinfo_all/diricinfoparent.html or http://www.ibm.com/systems/management/, which presents an overview of IBM Systems Management and IBM Systems Director.