Orchestrate a winning shot with latest release of Intelligent Management Center in your FlexNetwork

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By Gladys Alegre-Kimura, Global Product Manager, HP Networking

Have you been following the Linsanity story? What an amazing story! Jeremy Lin, the undrafted underdog sleeping on his brother’s couch just weeks ago, leads the NY Knicks to a seven-game winning streak. As I think about Jeremy Lin’s role, the point guard is a critical member in leading the basketball team. Point guards orchestrate plays by controlling the ball and passing it to players to ultimately score goals. Just like the point guard, Intelligent Management Center (IMC) is the network “point guard” managing and orchestrating functions across the network for optimal performance. As Jeremy has wowed NY Knicks fans, and me, by winning games night by night, IMC continues to provide something to wow about with new capabilities in this latest release, IMC v5.1.

IMC 5.1

In this latest release, IMC brings cool new features, which improves upon the management capability for all components of the FlexNetwork Architecture – FlexFabric, FlexCampus and FlexBranch. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be covering how IMC 5.1 can help administrators manage their network. Today, I’ll be covering the management enhancements for FlexFabric.

IMC now supports for two new critical components for data center, Hyper–V virtualization environments and Virtual Connect systems.

For customers who have deployed a Hyper- V virtual environment, administrators will now be able to visualize the mapping of Hyper-V virtual resources to managed physical resources. Have you tried mapping your virtual resources to the physical environment? I found out how simple it was to visualize in the IMC GUI. From the IMC network topology view, I was able to drill down to a specific Hyper-V VM and was able to obtain information about that VM including detailed information about virtual hosts and its virtual machines, port groups (including kernel and common port groups), vSwitches, and more. IMC goes a little further than providing just a logical mapping but also allows for network configurations to be synchronized based on Hyper-V machine migrations. Certainly this makes orchestrating your virtual environment a lot easier.

Supports HP Virtual Connect

IMC is also supporting HP Virtual Connect for HP blade servers in this release. The combination of IMC 5.1 and Virtual Connect Manager allows for control of the physical and virtual environment. Now, connection information from IMC can be pushed into Virtual Connect Manager. This now means you can quickly create server profiles, which make it easier to expand data center environments with HP blade servers. Does your data center use HP Virtual Connect technology? If so, IMC is definitely worth considering as your single pane-of-glass management platform that now also includes managing virtual connections for your HP blade servers.

The Hyper-V and Virtual Connect support are a couple of ways IMC 5.1, the network “point guard,” orchestrates data center operations; just as Jeremy Lin orchestrates that next winning shot.

IMC v 5.1 will be available for customers to evaluate for 60 days, purchase, or upgrade to if IMC v5.0 is previously installed, on Feb 13, 2012.

>> For more information on the IMC 5.1 release, please visit here.

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