IBM CSM to IBM Systems Director Transformation Guide

74 IBM CSM to IBM Systems Director Transformation Guide

4.1 Monitoring of resources

Monitoring provides the means to retrieve and visually observe real time changes in system

resources and should consist of at least the basic elements such as events, thresholds and

system health. Over the years monitoring seems to have shifted lanes from strict server

monitoring to application monitoring, because the signal to noise ration is often very poor on

server monitoring. Having defined end-to-end or inside-out monitoring for your application will

grant a much more granular information flow, as well as list the current state of the

application.

More importantly, it can help you track changes made to the system and provide you with a

baseline for future comparison.

Both Cluster Systems Management (CSM) and IBM Systems Director (ISD) provide a wide

range of monitoring capabilities, including support for customizations and scripting to meet

the exact needs.

4.2 Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC) versus IBM

Systems Director Agent Services

In this section, we briefly compare the differences between a CSM-managed RMC cluster

versus the IBM Systems Director Agent Service approach. Here we strictly focus on

monitoring and no other components are discussed.

򐂰 CSM

The cluster relies on the historic Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology (RSCT) framework

which traces its roots back to the RS/6000 SP and is considered a well respected product

that provide a robust cluster management capability. It has been a part of the AIX code

base since AIX 5L, and provides support for Linux, Solaris and Windows. CSM is only

available for AIX and Linux clusters.

򐂰 IBM Systems Director

This is a fairly new way of providing platform management and considered the corner

stone of the IBM Smarter System portfolio. It is based on the Common Information Model

(CIM) and supports multiple operation systems as well as virtualization technologies

across IBM and non-IBM platforms. It also provides an easy-to-use web management

interface, and utilizes Common Agent Services (CAS), which is known from the Tivoli

Provisioning Manager (TPM) suite and offers a shared infrastructure for managing

systems.

IBM Systems Director relies heavily on a web-based console where Cluster Systems

Management (CSM) offers a more command line-based approach. WebSM, the web-based

tool for system managementdoes, however, provide plug-in options for CSM. but it comes

with some limitations when compared to Systems Director. We do not cover the usage of

webSM in this book.

4.2.1 CSM using Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC)

The resource monitoring and control (RMC) subsystem is what is known as a generalized

framework for managing, monitoring and manipulating resources, those can be both physical

and logical. Aresource is the fundamental concept of RMC architecture. It refers to an

instance of a physical or logical entity that provides services to some other component of the