Insight Manager 7 vs IBM Director vs Dell OpenManage

[Marcos_23]

Is there any technical comparisson between Insight manager 7, IBM Director and/or Dell OpenManage. Im more interested in technical details and specifications of each product.

Thanks in advance

[David Claypool]

Exactly what are you trying to figure out? If you have a population of servers and want to choose a management product, despite capabilities that each claims in managing 3rd party products, you should choose what matches the predominant population.

Forget about IM7; its replacement is already available HP Systems Insight Manager.

http://www.hp.com/manage/servers

[Marcos_23]

What I'm looking is for the best management tool available but what we have is a mix of a lot of brands (Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu) so I need some way to give advice on one tool or other to my boss.

[Brian Hahne]

I use IM7, and tie it all together.
Dell actually has a white paper on how to use OpenManage within IM7.

We have clones(about 10), Dell(about 30), IBM (about 30), and about 200 HP Servers.

HP is the best option. IBM Director is clunky.. and doesn't integrate well.

Here's what you do:

Load a server with IM7 as a central console.
Load all HP agents on HP servers.
Load Toptools on legacy boxes.
Load Open Manage Agents on Dells
Load Director Agents only on IBM's.

Point all SNMP traps to go to HP server running IM.

When you get your server list, HP Proliants will populate ALL data.. including HW, MP, SW and PF where applicable.
Dell/Ibm/Clones will populate HW. SNMP traps will come into HP. If you click the server name, you'll get all the SNMP server data. If you click Management Homepage, it will bring you into Director or Dell's management page for that exact server.. So basically HP provides a centralized management console, to collect the data, but allows you to manage the servers with their own tools.

I have tried installations of Director and of OpenManage, and you just can't do that with them.. not with the ease you can of IM.

We're waiting on Systems Manager 4.1, to migrate, b/c we don't want to lose all our settings.

My recommendation, is to install IM7 with all patches, then get that up and running. In Q2, you'll be able to migrate that console to the lastest Systems Manager 4.1, retaining all settings.

B.Hahne
Team Leader
Palmetto Health

[Brian Hahne]

here's the link on getting Dell systems into IM7.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/Integrating_PowerEdge_Servers_into_Insight_Manager_Environment.doc


for IBM, just load director agents.
Set SNMP to send traps to the IM7 box.

[Marcos_23]

Thanks for the info but my boss is asking me to tell her wich are the main differences and I can't tell her that the main differences are that they look uglier one or another. I'm looking for some paper that tells me what can do one program and the others don't or something similar.

Thanks in advance

[Brian Hahne]

They don't integrate well into each other.
What you need to do, is go with the platform that you use most.

HP offers Version Control (software updates), Lights Out management, Performance Monitoring, etc.
They all do in fact.

If you have 100 dells, 5 hps and 5 ibms, you don't want to use Insight Manager.
You NEVER cross load agents either (don't load dell management agents on HP servers).
But if you use HP servers mostly, you want to leverage that.

Basically, 3rd party can only interpret traps sent. HP can interpret a Dell SNMP trap, but it can't do a Dell bios update.

If you want to do all that for each platform, use 1 server for each one.

That's the main requirement anyway also... is that HP IM7 needs to run on Proliant hardware. Director's main console runs best on IBM hardware.

I have an Im7 console, and a Director console. But I manage all my servers through IM7. By clicking on an IBM server name through IM7, I am brought to the local server's director tools... and that's all i really need.

If you use a different manager, AT THIS LEVEL, to manage cross platform, you're shoe-horning.

Of course, you could go 1 level higher and buy OpenView or Unicenter or Patrol.. but then you're talking $100K's... and free is much better!