Following are more details on the September announced new release Sun Ops Center 2.5, which introduces these features.

Solaris Zones

• Full lifecycle management (Discover, create, delete, configure, boot, shutdown, monitor)

• Migration capabilities (Cold migration, Test zone, Solaris 8/Solaris 9 migration)

Logical Domains (LDoms)

• Full lifecycle management
• Auto creation and provisioning of Control Domain onto bare metal systems for rapid deployment
• Complete provisioning of guest domain including OS provisioning
• Resource pool (policies for efficient system utilization, auto restart of LDom if the underlying resource fails)
• Warm Migration

Storage Library Management (for virtual resources)

• Fiber Channel
• ZFS

Oracle Enterprise Linux

• Discovery, OS provisioning, Patching, Monitoring

Windows patching

• Integrated with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, Ops Center provides the same user interface and similar capabilities for patching to Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Oracle Enterprise Linux and Windows. Ops Center offloads Windows patching to Configuration Manager. For other OS, Ops Center patches them natively.
• Comprehensive out of the box reports
• Windows asset discovery

Live Upgrade

• Uses Live Upgrade Alternate Boot Environments (ABE) in Solaris for staging deployments of new patches
• Customers save time by patching while Solaris systems are still running and only have the downtime of a reboot to activate new patches
• Rapid rollback to previous patches through a simple change of ABE and reboot

Simplified installation and deployment

• Simplifies the initial deployment process through wizard driven user interface.

Smart groups

• Logically group servers based on the category (SPARC, x86, different OS, Chassis, services (provisioning, patching, monitoring, virtualization)

Enterprise controller support

• Supports the running of Enterprise Controller within a Solaris local zone and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.3

Upgrade automation

Enterprise Controller and proxy can be upgraded through enhanced upgrade experience. BUI notifies users about new updates, downloads the updates and installs it on user's approval.

Browser support

Internet Explorer 7 is supported.

Video: What's New in Ops Center 2.5

This short video (runs 2:39) describes the new features of Sun Ops Center 2.5.

Ops Center in Action Product Tour

This Sun screencast (runs 13:23) hosted on SearchDataCenter.com (login or registration required) explains how Sun Ops Center can help IT departments:

• Gain control over system sprawl
• Provide more flexible infrastructures
• Ensure greater system compliance
• Reduce IT costs

About Sun Ops Center

Sun Ops Center provides a single unified console for discovery, monitoring, provisioning, updates and dynamic workload management, such as warm and cold migration to manage multi-platforms running Windows, Solaris and Linux-based systems. This comprehensive systems management solution for Sun's physical and virtual systems extends its centralized life cycle management to heterogeneous environments.

Sun Ops Center's architecture and easy-to-use interface scales across distributed data centers to easily manage sprawling physical and virtual resources and improve overall system efficiencies.

Subscriptions and Licensing

Customers can choose to subscribe to Sun Ops Center on an annual basis by purchasing a Premium Management Pack (includes physical system management), or a Enterprise Management Pack (additional support for virtualization features). Packs are sold on a per system basis. Premium support is part of this package.

Another option for customers is to buy a perpetual license with optional support.

Proxy and Enterprise controllers are available at no additional cost with subscription or perpetual license to allow customers to scale their architecture in large and global installations.

Training

There are two courses available for Ops Center 2.5:

• xVM Ops Center Administration (VC-VM-440)
• Sun Ops Center Administration (VM-440)

End of Life for Ops Center 2.0

With the availability of Ops Center 2.5, Sun has announced the end of life for Ops Center 2.0. The last order date is set for January 15, 2010, with a last ship date scheduled for April 16, 2010. The end of support life for this product will be when the subscription expires for the customer, so it is specific to each individual customer.

Keep in mind, Ops Center is a subscription-based product. When a new major release is announced like Ops Center 2.5, it automatically replaces older products such as the 2.0 release.

More Information

Version 2.5 Documentation

Sun Ops Center Information Exchange

Product Page

Datasheet

Feature Page on Ops Center 2.5 [...read more...]

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