admin of 50+ servers (HP-UX)

[Raf_L]

Team,


we all know how it goes, we start with one server, but over time, you end up with 10+ Superdomes, PARISC, Itanium, npars, vpars, 11.11, 11.23, 11.31 etc, etc. ending up in +50 "systems", physical or virtual.
The good news is, they all run HP-UX.

The question:
does anyone know a good product/framework, software, shareware of freeware to start/continue manage those 50+ servers more automatically from a central point ?

I'm thinking of:
1/ installing OS's
2/ deploying pathches
3/ executing scripts on the servers
4/ checking things on the servers
5/ displaying visually the servers (SD1 has 1 npar which in turn has 4 vpars...)


thanks for your wisdom ;-)


best regards,


Raf

[Ganesan R]

Hi,

Ignite-UX will help to achieve first three things.

For points 3,4 and 5, it depends on your requirement. You can use simple remote execution command to check the things like remsh, ssh etc.

If you need to monitor everything, you can think of HP openview or Tivoli kind of products.

[Raf_L]

Dear,

let me specify my question:

I would like to use 1 framework or software (which in turn can use whatever it likes (e.g. ignite, remsh)), but all I ideally would like to do is

1/ create a list of all hosts
2/ explain the tool/framwork once what should be done
3/ automate the rest.


(what you proposed are 3 tools ;-) which indeed I use today.)

brgds,


Raf

[Jozef_Novak · Accepted solution]

Regarding monitoring and management, HP SIM with VSE are the right tools for the job if you don't want to spend money for OV or Tivoli licenses. It offers a nice graphical display of all VSE components as you need them: physical servers broken down to npars, vpars, virtual machines with online resource display.

J.

[Patrick Wallek]

1) Create an Ignite/UX server. Create golden images of your appropriate HP-UX versions. You can then boot via the network and install your OS from the Ignite server. This is covered in more detail in the Ignite/UX docs.

2) Download and use the Software Assistant (SWA) package. It can analyze your servers and recommend patches. It can also download the recommended patches and create depots for each server. You can install the patches by pointing each server to the SWA server during swinstall. SWA is here: http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=B6834AA

3) I use SSH for this. Set up passwordless login from at least one server to all others. Keep a list of all of your servers, or several lists possibly delineated by OS, server function, etc. When you want to run something on all servers you do something like:

for SERVER in $(< server-list)
do
scp script ${SERVER}:/path/to/script
ssh ${SERVER} "/path/to/script ; rm -f /path/to/script"
done

4) Openview Operations is a very good tool, but it is expensive and can be somewhat difficult and time consuming to get set up. But once it is set up, it can notify you when things go awry.

5) No idea....