Sun™ Management Center Change Manager
Jonathan Han, Eric Nielsen, and Julie Nelson
When asked the question, “How do you like Sun’s administration
tool set?” most experienced Solaris administrators would chuckle and say,
“What administrator toolset?” This, I am happy to say, is changing.
For the past five years, Sun has been improving and enhancing its own systems
management portfolio, and Sun™ Management Center 3.0 has been growing in
popularity. Sun’s own IT department has deployed Sun Management Center and
is now managing thousands of its own servers with the product.
This year, Sun announced the systems management concept called iChange. Sun’s iChange concept was presented as a way to manage the change of all of the system software layers. As administrators know, the ever-increasing complexity of the layer dependencies makes it hard to roll out new solutions and keep them up to date. iChange was described as technology that would help solve this growing problem. Many of us were skeptical of the claims that new technology would solve this long-standing problem. So it was a pleasant surprise when Sun announced that the iChange concept would be released as the Change Manager module for the Sun Management Center product family. For many of the enterprise customers already using Sun Management Center, this was great news.
Sun Management Center, like several recent deployment products, takes advantage of a growing trend in the industry to deploy system software using complete system images to any client. Sun has offered pieces of this solution within the Solaris™ Operating Environment, but never integrated the pieces into a complete application. Solaris systems administrators are likely familiar with the capabilities of Solaris™ Flash software, Solaris JumpStart™ software, and Solaris™ Live Upgrade software. However, it takes quite a bit of time and scripting to use these technologies in a multi-client environment.
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