2020. 3. 4. 04:44ㆍ카테고리 없음
Enterprises of all size need quality, dependable, flexible, powerful, and extensible network management software but, over the years, most enterprises have struggled to find it. Traditional network management software offered only element management for the network and typically managed only a specific vendor’s hardware, with more advanced network troubleshooting being left to advanced tools or command-line options. For me, personally, network management software was always seen as a “necessary evil” – a tool that you “loved to hate”.
You had to have a NMS because you couldn’t possibly monitor the hundreds or thousands of nodes on your network but, once that tool found an outage, you were usually barraged with worthless information unless you, manually, resolved the issue from the command line. When it comes to NMS, most network admins say “there’s got to be a better way!”.As the modern enterprise datacenter has evolved, network management tools have tried to keep up and become more intelligent. However, most network management systems available today are aging tools that have been “duct-taped” together, over time. It’s really no surprise that these “legacy” tools can’t keep up with datacenters that are in a constant state of technological change.
Today’s datacenters are multi-vendor, use virtualization, software defined “everything”, connect to “the cloud”, and support “bring your own device” (BYOD). These are all challenges that traditional network management systems just weren’t designed to accommodate. Better yet, enterprises are expected to “do more with less” and they require intelligent software to make that a reality.HP’s Intelligent Management Center, or IMC, is a new breed of network management systems, designed to give enterprises the most comprehensive visibility, efficiency, and agility possible.In this review, HP’s IMC will be reviewed across 5 categories that match the demands of today’s evolving datacenters. They are:. Comprehensiveness. SDN and Convergence Support. Advanced Troubleshooting and Analysis.
Cloud and Virtualization Integration. BYOD Support. Figure 1 – HP IMC Dashboard – Click to Enlarge #1 ComprehensivenessThere is nothing worse than having multiple management tools running in the datacenter that have to be painstakingly pieced together to attempt to create a complete solution. Besides the slow “time to resolution” caused by this inefficient approach, implementing, maintaining, and supporting multiple tools is waste of money and time.What companies need is a single tool that offers all the capabilities needed. Thus, let’s start by reviewing the comprehensiveness of HP’s IMC.
Too many so-called network management tools are glorified monitoring and alerting tools that don’t go beyond ICMP pings and SNMP queries of network devices. Truly comprehensive tools should be designed to ensure that the tool is able to meet all the needs of a network administrator/manager. The best way to start designing such a tool is to base it on the industry-standard ISO FCAPS architecture and then enhance the tool, even further, with even more advanced capabilities. For those who aren’t familiar with it, FCAPS is:.
Fault. Configuration. Accounting (or administration).
Performance. SecurityIf you look at the network management tool you are using today, does it offer features that cover all of these areas?In mapping HP’s IMC to the FCAPS model, the graphic below shows that IMC does much more than the monitoring, alerting, and basic analysis as it offers functionality across the FCAPS model, at multiple levels. Figure 2c – Administrators can see the network topology and status of all the devices on the networkWith so many advanced optional modules, it’s tough to imagine IMC not providing the capabilities needed by just about every type of enterprise. However, if HP IMC doesn’t have a capability that you need or you just need to integrate it with another system (like a trouble ticket tracking system), it offers extendable APIs that allows it to communicate with other datacenter management systems.When it comes to the comprehensiveness of the network management application, HP’s IMC is one of the strongest solutions available. #2 Software-Defined Networking (SDN) SupportWith software-defined networking, greater intelligence is being brought to the network. With commodity hardware offering incredible performance, intelligent software can take advantage of that to do things that, in the past, were only possible in expensive dedicated hardware.To make this happen, the “data plan” (which forwards packets/frames) has been separated from the “control plane” (which is the intelligence behind the network functionality, like routing or switching).
The data plane can remain in the physical switch and the control plane moves into software. This is how many types of software defined networking (SDN) work but, in other cases, the data plane and the control plane have been completely virtualized.Examples of SDN might be the virtual routers, switches, firewalls and other software-defined solutions are common in the network infrastructure today.
Additionally, network hardware now has many more capabilities that make it “programmable”. For example, what if you want the network to dynamically know when running virtual machines move from datacenter to datacenter to allow network communications at all times (with no downtime)? Figure 3 – HP’s SDN Manager Solution – Click to EnlargeSDN is most beneficial to the enterprise when it can understand the company’s most critical applications and ensure the best quality possible for those applications, as they use the network.HP calls this application to network understanding “Virtual Application Networking”, or VAN. Figure 4 – HP IMC’s Network Configuration and Compare Screen – Click to EnlargeAs a network administrator, in many cases, it’s the smaller and seemingly simple tools that are the most valuable.
For example, being able to quickly compare the configuration between two routers or switches in seconds can saved me 10-15 minutes as compared to doing it manually. While that may sound like a small amount of time, when users are down or applications are running slow, 10-15 minutes can equate to thousands or, at some companies, millions of dollars of lost productivity.
Additionally, if you add up a 10-15 minute savings over a year, across multiple network administrators, you are talking about many hours of additional productivity for the network team.When it comes to advanced networking troubleshooting and analysis, HP’s IMC has offers too many tools to list (both at a high level and low level). For large enterprises and service providers where SLA is crucial to monitor and report on, the service health monitor is a feature that they can’t do without. #4 Cloud and Virtualization IntegrationWith most enterprises having virtualized most of their virtual machines, more and more, enterprises are implementing cloud platforms that will provide them (and their customers) greater business agility, applications on demand, and synchronization between applications and IT spend.
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When it comes to implementing, managing, monitoring and troubleshooting the network side of cloud infrastructures, HP is leading the charge.HP’s Virtual Application Networks (or VAN) Connection Manager module, enterprises are able to streamline networking for cloud infrastructures. With this integration between the virtual or cloud infrastructure and the network management platform (HP IMC in this case), enterprises can significantly reduce the time to deploy new virtual machines while keeping those VMs (and their applications secure and within SLA).
Figure 5 – Virtual Application Networks Management Framework – Click to EnlargeAligning IT operations to Converged Infrastructure and Cloud orchestration is exactly what enterprises need to be doing for the future. While many software companies are still developing or testing their cloud management platform integrations and software-defined networking solutions, HP’s IMC is leading the industry with numerous cloud, virtualization, and SDN offerings already available. #5 BYOD SupportSimply telling users to bring their own device instead of using a company-provided device is easy. However, managing, securing, troubleshooting, and scaling a BYOD infrastructure is complex.
For example, once you lose control over the end user device, how do you know what user maps to what device, IP address, and network port? (and what if they are on a wireless connection?)To successfully, securely, and reliably implement BYOD across physical and wireless, HP recommends the following HP IMC components:. User Access Manager – provides identity-based access for routers switches and servers.
UAM is not just policy-based user access authentication but also includes policy-based device fingerprinting and endpoint deployment OTA. Endpoint Admission Defense – integrates security policy management and endpoint posture assessment. Figure 6 – HP’s BYOD End-to-End Management Solution – Click to Enlarge David’s Analysis of the New HP IMC 7.0With their latest 7.0 release of Intelligent Management Center (IMC), HP has created an outstanding network management, performance, and troubleshooting solution.Here are just a few of the enhancements that I was immediately impressed by:. Packaging improvements– I have to applaud HP for changing their packaging to license HP IMC in smaller increments to help smaller companies.
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Previously, IMC was licensed in a 100-node package for the standard edition and a 200-node package for the enterprise edition. With the release of IMC 7.0, IMC standard and enterprise are packaged in a 50-node license package. The HP network traffic analysis module is licensed in a 10-node package.
These licenses changes will help make IMC more affordable because companies can purchase the right number of node licenses for the number of nodes on their network instead of being forced to overbuy. User interface and usability – One of my frequent complaints with NMS applications is their poor user interface and usability. With the new release, HP has dramatically improved the user interface and usability. The new HTML5 interface is fast and responsive, making IMC a pleasure to use.
The HP IMC interface can even be customized with the new built-in themes to personalize your user experience. Mobile-ready– with the move to HTML5, the IMC interface is now mobile-ready. This allows you to access the IMC from a mobile device and check network status and perform basic troubleshooting.In my years spent managing an enterprise network and troubleshooting network issues, never did I have a NMS that I was truly happy with. Instead, I had to glob together a mixture of various commercial, free tools, and homegrown scripts to give me and my network management team, everything that we needed.Over the last few years, I have spent most of my time working with virtualization.
While analyzing HP IMC, I really appreciated that IMC’s virtualization monitor (vMon) is able to monitor and analyze the virtual network, just as well as it does the physical network. Finally this will give network managers the insight into the virtual network that they need (and which they had lost when servers were virtualized). With vMon in place, finger pointing between virtualization teams and network teams can be eliminated because both teams will have the analysis they need to quickly rule out the network or identify the network problem.Having spent time learning and using the new version of HP IMC, I can say that, today, if I were managing the same enterprise network and team, I could confidently select just a single network management solution.
With HP’s IMC being so comprehensive (covering SDN, virtualization, BYOD, wireless, performance monitoring, and more), with its data being stored in a single database, and with it all being accessed by a single console, HP’s Intelligent Management Center would very likely be my tool of choice.Learn more about HP’s IMC at the. About the AuthorDavid Davis is a well-known virtualization and cloud computing expert, author, speaker, and analyst. He holds several certifications including VCP5, VCAP-DCA, CCIE #9369, and has been awarded the VMware vExpert award 6 years running. Additionally, David has spoken at major conferences like VMworld and authored hundreds of articles for websites and print publications. David’s library of popular video training courses can be found at Pluralsight.com.
I've got a Windows 2008 R2 server that I'd ideally like to now decommission - as it's one of the last surviving servers that's not 2012 R2. It's sole purpose at the moment is literally just running the HP ProCurve Manager V3 which is a great program - but no longer in development or freeware.I'd like to know if there's any (preferably free) alternative now to ProCurve Manager? It's really handy to see all our switches in one place, their status, firmware version, ports in use etc.The majority of our switches are HP, so anything that can pull the majority of info into one place (like ProCurve manager) would be great.I looked at perhaps exporting the data out of ProCurve Manager and seeing if the software could be installed and the data imported on the new server, but number 1, the software version is out of date - I'd prefer something more modern, and number 2, the current installation requires an update in the license to do so. AshleyLewisMS wrote:I've got a Windows 2008 R2 server that I'd ideally like to now decommission - as it's one of the last surviving servers that's not 2012 R2. It's sole purpose at the moment is literally just running the HP ProCurve Manager V3 which is a great program - but no longer in development or freeware.I'd like to know if there's any (preferably free) alternative now to ProCurve Manager? It's really handy to see all our switches in one place, their status, firmware version, ports in use etc.The majority of our switches are HP, so anything that can pull the majority of info into one place (like ProCurve manager) would be great.I looked at perhaps exporting the data out of ProCurve Manager and seeing if the software could be installed and the data imported on the new server, but number 1, the software version is out of date - I'd prefer something more modern, and number 2, the current installation requires an update in the license to do so.Unfortunately I haven't resolved this.