Verari Command Center®
Verari Command Center (VCC) is an integrated
server-based solution for deploying, confi guring,
monitoring and managing the servers,
workstation blades, storage and related chassis
components found in Verari’s BladeRack® 2
X-Series platforms. VCC can also manage
third party devices via the Intelligent Platform
Management Interface (IPMI). VCC was
designed for “hands-off” remote management
and is the centerpiece of Verari’s data center
management strategy. VCC provides a robust
set of management services that can be
accessed via a web services API and comes
with a native management console that fully
leverages this API to deliver comprehensive
system management for your data center.
Product Editions
To provide greater flexibility, VCC comes in
three editions, which allows users to choose
the right level of management to match their
specific needs:
VCC Standard Edition:
Offers basic functionality. VCC Standard
provides customers with the most essential
monitoring and management capabilities.
VCC Advanced Edition:
For the customer who needs more than
just basic management and monitoring.
Has added capabilities such as OS level
monitoring, provisioning and remote BIOS
upgrades.
VCC Enterprise Edition:
For customers with large-scale enterprise
requirements for data center systems
management. The Enterprise Edition provides
customers with the most comprehensive
management feature set available for the
BladeRack 2 X-Series.
Challenges for the Enterprise Data Center
The industry is seeing larger, more dynamic
environments that have scale-out and scale-up
requirements with an explosion in the number
of components to manage. These components
include physical servers, virtual servers,
storage and related infrastructure, along with
a diversity of operating systems, applications
and fi rmware. Add to this the need for power
and thermal management as well as keeping
track of inventory, including geographically
remote assets. Complexity is driving Total Cost
of Management (TCM) to more than 70% of the
IT budget.
End-to-End Systems Management
Verari Command Center is an end-to-end
management solution that was purposebuilt
to address the complexity of the modern
data center. For comprehensive management
of Verari’s BladeRack 2 X-Series, there is
no alternative to VCC. It provides a native
management console as well as a standards
aligned management architecture and open
API that allows Verari solutions to be managed within an existing data center management
environment.
Extensible Open Architecture
VCC’s open standards aligned architecture
allows the BladeRack 2 X-Series to be easily
assimilated. A published and documented
management API enables customers to
integrate VCC easily into their management
infrastructure or write their own management
scripts to meet each company’s own unique
needs. Users can integrate common tasks via
simple scripts in their choice of many languages
(e.g., C#, Perl, Powershell). In addition, VCC
also provides SNMP support to allow easy
integration into third party management
environments.
Remote Management
VCC provides lights out and “hands-off”
data center management, eliminating the
need for people to touch the rack. VCC
enables system administrators to perform
tasks remotely on many servers all at once.
VCC provides remote power management
features as well as LED management
to identify blades. Another feature of
“hands-off” management is Remote Serial
Console, which enables users to edit BIOS
confi gurations, view POST information and
access low-level tools.
In addition, VCC allows the user to access
and remotely control multiple computers or
servers using the TCP/IP protocols with KVM
over IP and Virtual Media support on selected
nodes.
Provisioning
Installing operating systems and
applications remotely is a major focus of
VCC. Provisioning allows for “bare-metal”
OS installation for a number of Linux-OS
variants as well as Windows® Server 2003.
In addition to OS provisioning, VCC has
the ability to remotely check and update
infrastructure fi rmware and can upgrade the
BIOS of one or more blades in parallel.
Monitoring and Reporting
VCC provides hardware-level monitoring for
displaying the status of each blade as well
as other rack infrastructure components.
VCC can detect and report blade insertion
and removal, fan speed, rack temperatures,
rack fan speed, power status, LED status
and more.
When blades have a supported Linux
or Windows OS installed and the VCC
monitoring agent is running, the OS Level
monitoring feature enables real-time
monitoring and visualization of critical
system performance data, which will be
useful to administrators to detect and
troubleshoot key performance bottlenecks
on managed nodes.
VCC also allows users to monitor power
usage and get reports on longer term power
consumption per blade.
The occurrence of a predefi ned or a userdefi
ned change of state in the system is
called an event. VCC provides the ability
to monitor and log events that occur in the
BladeRack 2 X-Series, manage what types
of events are reported and to assign event
notifi cation properties. VCC gives users
the ability to manage events associated
with a wide range of infrastructure events,
including dozens of predefi ned events such
as blade power status or rack temperature
as well as custom user defi ned events. Event
notifi cation options can include forwarding
to syslog server or email notifi cation. In
addition, any VCC event can also be raised
as an SNMP Trap.
IPMI & Virtualization Support
VCC can provide management support
for servers via IPMI. This means that VCC
can support systems that are both outside
and inside the BladeRack 2 X-Series. This
support allows VCC to provide aggregate
control for IPMI-centric platforms that are
aimed at the Web 2.0 application space.
VCC currently has the ability to enroll and
recognize VMware ESX servers. The Physical
(P-) blades and Virtual (V-) blades are part of
the GUI. V-blades (if present) are displayed
in the sidebar tree with name and power
status. Power management (on/off/reset) of
the V-blades is supported.
© 2008 Verari Systems, Inc. All rights reserved
