Key Features - IBM Flex System Manager Product Manual

Key features

IBM Flex System Manager is designed to help you get the most out of your IBM PureFlex System while
automating repetitive tasks. IBM Flex System Manager can reduce the number of manual navigational
steps for typical management tasks. From simplified system setup procedures with wizards and built-in
expertise to consolidated monitoring for all of your physical and virtual resources (compute, storage, and
networking), IBM Flex System Manager provides core management functionality along with automation
so you can focus your efforts on business innovation.
IBM Flex System Manager has the following key features:
Optimizing your workload management through built-in expertise

With a workload-optimized approach, you can decrease infrastructure costs and improve service
levels. You can create and modify system pools using virtual workloads, make dynamic virtual
workload adjustments, and move workloads within system pools, resulting in an optimized virtual
environment with increased resilience to cope with planned or unplanned down time. A system pool is
a group of virtualized system components that are managed as a single entity, allowing you to
manage the pools with the simplicity of managing a single system, which is an essential capability for
moving to cloud computing and a dynamic infrastructure.
Managing all of your resources with one solution

Beginning with deployment through maintenance, upgrades, and problem resolution, IBM Flex
System Manager is designed to provide all of the key management functions for your integrated IT
resources from a single, easy to use interface. From your office or remotely through a secure
connection, you can manage your compute, storage, network and virtualized resources.
Compute

Auto discovery and setup wizards make deploying compute nodes quick and easy using the IBM
Flex System Manager. After it is deployed, IBM Flex System Manager provides real-time updates
for compute node "health" summaries. With the ability to define performance thresholds to trigger
alerts, you can automate responses to potential problems help keep your critical business
applications running at peak performance. IBM Flex System Manager can detect many problems
with essential system resources and recover automatically. IBM Flex System Manager can also
perform trend analysis to forecast and prevent future problems that otherwise might lead to
expensive system outages.
Storage

IBM Flex System Manager helps you address storage management challenges from device
deployment and through the data life cycle. Storage deployment capabilities in the IBM Flex
System Manager include storage device discovery and simple logical and physical device
configuration from a single interface. IBM Flex System Manager can provide physical and logical
storage topology views and can show relationships between storage and server resources, giving
you the ability to track key resources based on their business usage. Provisioning capabilities
include image management for simple virtual machine creation, deployment and cloning. You can
also manage storage system pools for data life cycle management and storage placement based
on business policies.
Networking

Networking resources allow your virtualized compute and storage resources to communicate and
function in the cloud. IBM Flex System Manager delivers end-to-end network management for
your PureFlex System from a single tool. IBM Flex System Manager supports automated network
discovery to speed deployments. It also offers a graphical view of the network from the integrated
user interface. Network resources are pooled and virtualized. With logical network profiles, you
can quickly and easily specify the network connectivity characteristics of a virtual machine.
IBM Flex System Manager 2