Originally posted on IBM Developer blog “Exploring PureApplication System, Software Service and more” by Marco Mantegazza on 18 October 2013 (8728 visits)
In a previous post I started discussing the lifecycle management of patterns. In this post I will focus now on a specific environment: IBM PureApplication System.
Lifecycle management of running systems is probably one of the most important and time consuming tasks in the day-by-day IT specialists’ activities. Late last year, the IDC estimated that in 2013 more than 68% of the IT budget goes to the management and administration of the existing environment*.
IBM’s PureSystems deliver value throughout the IT lifecycle, by saving deployment and management labor hours, which helps in reducing that 68% to a lower number. Key to providing these savings are the Patterns of Expertise, which can be provided by IBM, by IBM’s Business Partners, or built by yourself.
One of the new features in the IBM PureApplication System v1.1 release offers an improvement of the update process of your deployed instance’s operating system. Managing the lifecycle of a deployed system requires you, at some point, to upgrade the operating system of the running VM, either to apply a patch or to install any other system components.
PureApplication System v1.1 provides a way to upgrade not only the “classic” Red Hat-based and AIX-based Hypervisor Edition images, since the support for those operating systems came with v1.0, but also images based on the newly supported Windows OS. The updates are managed through shared services, with a slight difference:
- To update the Red Hat-based images, you have to deploy the Red Hat OS Update shared service. This service provides a local Yellowdog Updater, Modified (YUM) repository for the cloud group it is running on. IBM provides a certificate that grants access to the updates form Red Hat.
- To update the AIX-based or the Windows-based images, you have to deploy the IBM Endpoint Manager shared service which allows your system to connect to an external IBM Endpoint Manager server.
This new feature greatly simplifies the lifecycle management of operating system updates in PureApplication System v1.1, and hence the overall simplified management experience that PureApplication System offers.
For additional details on how PureApplication System, and more in general patterns of expertise, helps you to ease your system’s lifecycle management, have a look at the Redpaper “Cloud Computing Pattern of Expertise”.
Feel free to comment or share any thoughts on this topic!
* IDC; Converged Systems: End-User Survey Results presentation; September 2012; Doc #236966
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