A server room may have hundreds of BladeCenters and thousands of various types of blades and other modules, and using them flexibly and efficiently can be a big challenge. IBM Resource Monitor for BladeCenter Server Room, with limited pre-configuration information, can pool all the BladeCenters to collect the required attributes of each hardware resource, including the module type, module name, serial number, firmware level and more, for blade and switches. This will allow you to quickly locate the modules with certain attributes. The user login can also be explicitly displayed to prevent usage conflict and identify intrusion.

How does it work?

IBM Resource Monitor for BladeCenter Server Room uses the TCP command interface provided by the Advanced Management Module of BladeCenter. The functional Dot Commands are tunneled in the TCP/IP layer to retrieve the information on chassis and modules.

A future version of the tool is expected to to include Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino technology, wherein all the data will be gathered by Java agents, stored into an NSF database and displayed by the Notes client or Web browser. All server room resource information could then be sorted and filtered by various Views in the Domino application.

LiChuan is a staff software engineer in IBM CDL Shanghai. He graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University and has broad experience on many areas of software engineering. He has worked for firmware development on Advance management module on BladeCenter since 2006.

Tang Guifeng is a staff software engineer in IBM CSTL Shanghai. He graduated from Nanjing University and is an expert in network technology. Since 2005, he has worked for BladeCenter related software development.