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Server Management Tools for your Data Center
Whether you want to roll out patches across your servers' fleet, or figure out which servers need to be upgraded; or maybe you want to roll out a new server altogether, there's a server management software available for the job. Here, we look at six such tools
Swapnil Arora
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
There are endless server management tools available in the market. But one
thing common to all of them is that they bring all servers of your data center
into one console, from where you can keep track of their status and easily
manage them. Server management is essentially a process and not a technology.
And different server management solutions use different types of technologies.
For example, if you want to do remote trouble shooting of the servers, then one
solution for this could be Windows RDP and an other solution could be VNC. In
both cases you are actually doing the same thing but using different
technologies. So which technology should you use? Or rather, which server
management tool should you use? The answer to this is not very easy, so in this
story we'll take you through various types of server management tools, the kind
of features they offer and how does one go about choosing the right one. Let's
start by looking at the kinds of features available in today's server management
tools.
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Auto discovery
Auto discovery is a common yet useful feature for discovering servers running on
the network. A good server management solution should be able to detect all
functional servers on your network, let them be in any subnet or behind a
firewall. These auto discovery agents should also be able to discover servers
using different types of protocols and not just TCP/IP.
After discovery of servers is through and details are stored in the database,
some server management solutions like Novell Zenworks could be used, which allow
you to set automatic discovery mode. In this mode, the software monitors the
network continuously over a given interval for new servers and also keeps the
network topology in its records up-to-date.
Monitoring
Monitoring is an integral part of any server management solution, as it provides
real time status of servers' health. This includes monitoring server hardware
components like hard disk space, CPU usage, temperature, fan speed, etc. A lot
of server management solutions also support services, events and critical
processes monitoring. Most software provide real time summary of all monitoring
policies on the software's main console or dashboard to give administrators
status of servers' health. Another important feature is software license and
application usage monitoring, also known as software metering. A good server
management solution should also do agent as well as agent-less monitoring.
Alerts
Just monitoring servers and applications is not enough. Alerts in case of a
problem or even proactive alerts are very important to ensure that
administrators are informed instantly through e-mail, logs, sound, SNMP traps,
and through software's console itself. Some solutions also provide Page and SMS
alerts.
Server inventory
This is also called assets management. It includes keeping track of hardware as
well as software installed on the servers. A good server inventory solution
should be able to track each and every component of your server and at the same
time can trigger an alert in case of any missing or malfunctioning hardware. In
some cases license management can also be a part of the server inventory module.
Patching up vulnerabilities
Detecting and then patching them up are also part of server management. Applying
OS and application updates as soon as they are released are some very crucial
tasks to be performed to avoid any exploits. Server management solutions allow
you to automate this whole process hence removing the need to manually update
servers, everyday. With this process automated, server management solution can
automatically scan all servers present on the network regularly and download the
patches for vulnerabilities detected and install them on respective servers.
It also maintains a recovery point which can be used for system roll back in
case a new patch causes an application error or a system crash.
High availability
Some server management tools such as OpenQRM provide high availability as well,
by doing automatic hardware failover. When a server failure occurs and after a
while when server monitoring component doesn't receives any updates, it declares
the server dead and starts a new server or transfers its load to another server
running on the network. This kind of a feature can only be achieved if you use a
server management tool which works in centralized manner where all your system
settings and data including your OS are kept on the network (on a NAS or a SAN)
and servers are booted remotely.
Deploying applications
Software management tools provide an end to end seamless deployment of an
application on remote server. Some server management tools even let you remotely
install OS with applications. The OS installations are unattended and can be
performed from anywhere.
Intel Server Manager
This is an easy to use, basic server management solution. It lets you do
system inventory, monitor servers' health, processes, services etc. It can
monitor various hardware sensors like temperatures, fan speeds, voltages,
chassis intrusions, RAID configurations, redundancy status of components etc. It
has a web based control where details of managed servers can be viewed. It
requires agents to be installed on the servers before it can monitor them.
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