Hi Ben, I wonder about the usefulness of such tools as well. Since most medium to large shops are using BMC, HP OpenView, or Tivoli, they normally have their own agents, modules, and plug-ins. Some of them piggy-back onto the SunMC framework to get more detailed info on Sun servers. Ultimately though, I find it all rather complicated to configure let alone manage. Luckily, I haven't had to deal with such things in a long time. But it's an area that I think needs addressing in OpenSolaris. The biggest issue I've seen in the commercial area is the need for custom (extra cost) modules to monitor the things people really care about on modern Solaris servers (SMF, Zones, FMA, etc.). The other one being that some of the products out there are just running scripts and parsing output, thusly putting extra load on servers.. even Nagios is guilty of this. I have seen some nice monitoring tools such as UpTime which is more lightweight and gets the basics right.
But what should be the standard in OpenSolaris? We've had Sun's SNMP/CIM/WBEM, net-snmp, and SunMC in Solaris. Seeing how SunMC will at some point transition to xVM Opscenter, it might make sense to get those guys to chime in on the topic. But I still think the issue of having a generic framework that other products and tools can leverage makes the most sense. But there should be extra value into it that's specific to OpenSolaris so that users and customers don't have a reason to toss it out the window. Otherwise, what's the point? It also kinda brings up other things that are in the mix. Management tools for Solaris/OpenSolaris is another area that's rather murky. In Solaris we had SMC, which most people ignored due to its bloated and unusable ways from before S10. Then in S10 webmin was included which has some great integration with Solaris specific features. In addition there is the webconsole BUI that popped up. It's a nice interface for ZFS, SunCluster, N1GE, APOC, etc. Unfortunately, most sysadmins are not aware or care about these tools a whole lot. There really should be one framework for doing single point or centralized management of Solaris/OpenSolaris servers. As of yet, I have not seen a real direction from Sun. Most of the management tools in the OpenSolaris space are really desktop driven and not sysadmin driven for managing the enterprise. While it's great that Sun is focusing on the desktop, it's not making Solaris sysadmins work easier. While experienced folks such as Ben and myself don't mind the CLI at all and live there.. it doesn't help bring in new people. The big challenges for companies around managing Solaris today are: 1. No Budget for experienced sysadmins, let alone training. 2. Most staff is still stuck in the Solaris 8 era and have little experience or knowledge of Solaris 9 or Solaris 10 3. Lack of in-house knowledge leads to customers being less likely to use new features in Solaris 10 or even use OpenSolaris 4. Out-sourcing generally leads to lower skill sets. While I believe that companies today should invest in training their staff, it's usually the last thing companies spend money on next to security. Sun and the OpenSolaris community should try to fix this. The easier we make OpenSolaris to use and adopt, the greater chance Sun has of getting the adoption rate up and really helping companies. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: [email protected] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Ben Rockwood <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 3:34:42 AM Subject: [sysadmin-discuss] WBEM/CIM Dead? I've kept my eye on the DMTF for a couple years, but honestly only found any usefulness from them as Sun's ELOM/ILOM, and now others, started adopting SMASH CLP for SP interfaces. CIM and WBEM are standards I've seen used as backends for things like the aging Solaris Management Console (SMC) and such but never really gave much thought to beyond a Wikipedia level knowledge of it. So what I find curious is that WBEM was really supposed to be the successor to SNMP; at least that seems to be how its pitched. But it hasn't in my mind. I mean, how many sysadmins are out there managing systems using WBEM, unless it is, like SMC, a backend technology for some front-end tool. I noticed that a lot of the old Solaris8/9 stuff got scaled back in S10 it would seem and is almost completely absent in OpenSolaris. So whats the deal? Is anyone versed in DMTF's CIM/WBEM standards? Is it just me or are they dying the death? I would seem they are still fairly popular in the Windows world, but they seem to be disappearing from modern UNIX operating systems. Can anyone straighten me out? benr. _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss
