I suspect most enterprise customers know the power of Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) in a Virtual Connect (VC) infrastructure that allows Sever, Storage and Networking Admins the ability to manage up to 16K servers. Supporting a huge number of servers connected via VC from a single console is important for our larger customers, but there are some benefits that can be extended to all customers - regardless of size.
Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) centralizes connection management and workload mobility for HP BladeSystem servers that use VC to access LANs, SANs and converged network infrastructures. VCEM maintains an address database that enables more efficient administration of data and storage network assignments (MAC and WWN). It also eliminates the risk of address conflicts. Using VCEM you can add, change, move, and automatically failover servers and their workloads across the data center in minutes without impacting production networks.
If your business has remote locations or branch offices, and you want to centralize network connections and workload management, VCEM can address this. We’ve learned that managing the remote location used to entail travel cost. By centralizing your network connectivity, VCEM eliminates the cost of travel and deployment that is needed to manage remote locations.
Another example is that VCEM allows you to configure and manage multiple Virtual Connect domain groups (very useful in multi-tenancy environments).
VCEM allows you to control failover and perform profile failover operations. This software feature provides a fast-recovery tool that can help you minimize planned, or unplanned, downtime. Manually moving a VC server profile requires four steps, including powering down the server. The steps are:
1) Power down the original or source server
2) Select a new target server
3) Move the VC server profile to the target server
4) Power up the new server.
VCEM server profile failover combines these separate steps into a single operation. It enables automated movement of VC server profiles and associated network connections to user-defined spare servers in a VC domain group. You can initiate profile failover from the VCEM GUI as a one-button operation, or from the VCEM failover CLI. The CLI lets you script server profile moves within the same VC domain group.
There is a new course available for Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) that is out on the HP HP's eLearning portal. It’s Windows Based Training (WBT) and costs only $400.
The Web Based training covers the network management capabilities of VCEM and how to design a VCEM environment, as well as perform operations and use VC profiles. It will be informative and productive for anyone that currently manages, or plans to manage, the configuration of HP BladeSystem c-Class network connectivity and blade servers with Virtual Connect.
The WBT's datasheet is available and can be accessed here.
