Server Management Tools for your Data Center

Continued from page: 2

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

NetDirector NetDirector is a configuration management solution for Linux and Solaris servers. It lets you configure changes to multiple servers through a single console and also lets you implement one change to all servers or as many severs as you want in one-go. In NetDirector you can schedule changes to occur in the future across all servers at a particular time. You can also track all past changes, like who made them, when and what exactly was changed. The changes can also be rolled back to any previous state which can be handy during a server crash and can help you reduce down time. It also supports cloning for servers which can be useful when adding a new server to the network and for Disaster Recovery.

NetDirector Server Manager supports two types of logins namely user and admin logins. When you login as an administrator, you can define which users can manage individual servers and services and set various role based policies. When a user logs in, only the servers under his role are visible to the user.

NetDirector is also an agent based solution. When NetDirector's agents are installed, they connect over SSL to NetDirectror server. The agent is used to monitor services, execute commands and perform tasks on the managed server. NetDirector also allows users to create and run their own modules and scripts.

Managing servers
To start managing servers in NetDirector you need to install agents on them and create roles for every server. Role is collation of system user, services running on the servers and the services managed by user. To create a role from the main console of NetDirector, go to Manage Roles. Here click on Add a new Role and provide the Role Name and Description. Now Click on the Services & Servers and Role Administration window will open. Here select the service you want to manage from Services field and select servers on which the role has to be assigned. If you want to clone a server, from the main console select the server and its services you want to clone and click on the Clone button. It will now clone the settings. Similarly from here you can manage services for various servers.

NetDirector allows you to review configuration changes and roll back changes with just one click

After you have made a change to a service, you can either choose to apply it immediately or schedule the change to get it applied on a later date. If you want to schedule a change, click on the calendar icon, which will pop-up a calendar, here select the date and provide the time when the change has to be made in 24-hour format and click on apply. You can also choose the same changes to be applied to all servers or a group of servers from the schedule window. You can also rollback these changes later on if required. To rollback go to the Rollback option on the main window, select the service and than the server to view the changes that you have made in the past. To rollback the changes, click on the Restore tab. In NetDirector similarly you can easily configure and monitor various other services like FTP, DHCP, Samba, Bind, Apache, etc.

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