CiRBA announced Version 7.1 of the CiRBA Control Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. CiRBA 7.1 offers multi-hypervisor support, including support for VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
The PowerVM platform has very strong capabilities but it also some complexity over other environments, Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. It is very flexible and can be configured in interesting ways for high availability, he adds. And, because this platform is typically used for mission-critical applications which need to be highly available, Hillier says the value that CiRBA provides resonates with customers because of the predictive analytics that allow them to model in detail how they want those applications to operate. “This is exactly the kind of platform that you don’t want to take chances with,” he notes.
CiRBA Version 7.1 aims to reduce the complexity of capacity management for virtualized AIX environments with analytics software that natively understands the advanced capabilities of the PowerVM platform such as Logical Partitions (LPARs), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS), shared processor pools, Capacity on Demand and HA failover nodes. “We make it look the same as others in terms of the hypervisor so it is all under one umbrella, but under the covers there are some very advanced features that need to be managed in that platform,” says Hillier. By combining these capabilities with historical utilization data and detailed operational policies, CiRBA's Control Console provides visibility into infrastructure health for VMs, hosts and host groups, and generates the detailed actions required to optimize workload placements, resource allocations and other critical capacity decisions.
According to CiRBA, its analytics use comprehensive policies that determine where workloads and applications should be placed within the infrastructure and how much resource should be allocated to VMs (LPARs), VIOS, and resource pools. In addition, out-of-the-box, CiRBA provides specific policies governing SLA requirements, high availability, host resource utilization thresholds, VM allocation thresholds, security and compliance, licensing, and placement constraints, so organizations can confidently place mission-critical applications into PowerVM environments and optimize their density without incurring risk. Smarter placements, accurate allocations and increased density enable organizations to defer purchases by making the best use of existing infrastructure, and also result in significant savings in terms of software licensing costs.
CiRBA 7.1 enables organizations to: Visualize the health of PowerVM Infrastructure through a single console; measure the overall efficiency of PowerVM environments with the CiRBA Efficiency Index (CEI) showing how many servers are required vs. how many exist based on all the constraints in an environment, including utilization, policy, and growth; control capacity reservations and increase forecasting accuracy with bookings; get prescriptive actions to avoid capacity shortfalls; and gain visibility into available capacity and waste.
CiRBA Version 7.1 will be generally available in July 2012. For more information, visit www.cirba.com