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Every day, organizations face the task of managing their IBM Power Systems infrastructure and virtualization. Operations teams always have to be on their toes to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of logical partition (LPAR) deployments, decommissions, storage volume management, SAN zoning, managing standardized OS image catalogues and whatnot. But how can you manage these tasks efficiently and improve turnaround time? In short, how can the IT operations team be more nimble and efficient?

IBM PowerVC for virtualization management

IBM PowerVC is a virtualization and cloud management solution that can help operations teams manage virtualized IBM Power Systems infrastructure effectively by simplifying repetitive tasks.

Here are seven ways PowerVC can help your operations team be more productive:

1.    Quick LPAR provisioning

Provisioning LPARs using PowerVC takes only a few clicks. Behind the scenes, PowerVC automates tasks related to virtual LPAR creation, adding volumes, activating the operating system, SAN zoning and so forth. Without PowerVC, these tasks can take a considerable amount of time. This allows IT operations to swiftly react to demands for additional LPAR resources for new workloads or expanding existing workloads.

2.    Tidy up during decommissioning

Decommissioning LPARs requires lot of clean-up on multiple devices. In a production environment, it’s important to precisely identify each configuration item related to the LPAR on every device, including server, SAN switches and storage. Subsequently, clean-up has to be performed with utmost caution. PowerVC automates these tasks, and hence deleting LPARs and their resources can be done safely and cleanly.

3.    Standard OS image deployment and image catalogue

Deploying a standard image and managing and tracking various images with different OS versions can be a tedious task. PowerVC provides a catalogue to maintain OS images in an organized way. As PowerVC maintains the images in storage, a separate facility like a Network Installation Manager (NIM) server isn’t required to maintain and manage OS images. This reduces management and operational overheads for the administrators and helps in managing the images in an uncluttered way. PowerVC also provides capabilities to export and import those images.

4.    Efficiently manages disk volumes on LPARs

Disk volumes are frequently added and deleted in running LPARs. PowerVC provides a single interface to create and attach disk volumes from storage. This simplifies the addition and deletion of volumes on LPARs and provides the ability to make disk space available to applications quickly.

5.    Standard deployments

PowerVC automates the LPAR deployment process. This helps you avoid error-prone manual deployments so you can implement a consistent environment. PowerVC provides templates to standardize CPU and memory configurations, storage connectivity, fc port tagging and the like. This allows control over IBM Power Systems resources and deployment of LPARs with optimal configurations.

6.    Simple, intuitive interface

Importantly, PowerVC provides a simple, intuitive interface that allows even beginners to deploy LPARs with ease. PowerVC handles all complexities related to LPAR management under the hood. This is a powerful capability that allows IT operations staff to effectively utilize resources.

7.    PowerVC application programming interface

PowerVC has a rich set of RESTful APIs. This allows for advanced automation capabilities that can be used to confederate with deployment engines, monitoring tools, higher-layer automation and cloud managers, scripts and so forth.

PowerVC has many more capabilities that can help IT operations teams excel in their day-to-day work, and many are being added with each new release of PowerVC. (Here’s a full list of capabilities of the current PowerVC release 1.4.3 and a list of PowerVC hardware and software requirements.)

IBM Systems Lab Services has Power Systems consultants who can help you deploy the building blocks of a next-generation IT infrastructure. This includes helping you implement PowerVC as a foundation for OpenStack-based private cloud management services for Power Systems, storage and networking. Contact us today to see how we can help.

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