HP SIM vs IBM Director

[cybacaT]

Hi All

I've been tasked to do a thorough comparison between HP SIM 5 and IBM Director 5.1, and then report to management on their relative merits. At present we're a 180+ server site with mostly IBM gear, but a few Proliants have been implemented lately. How this evaluation of SIM goes will be a big factor in determining whether future purchases are IBM or HP. Management is not willing to go the next step and purchase Enterprise system management software, so the comparison can only be on what is freely offered by the vendors.

What resources can you recommend for doing a comparison?

How do they compare for support of heterogeneous environments? We have some midrange boxes, Unix servers etc.

We collect performance metrics on our servers for future - this is part of our capacity planning for distributed servers. I believe this is offered for HP servers, but does HP SIM offer this for non-HP servers?

If not, is there some kind of agent you can get for non-HP servers? Ballpark cost?

Can you get monitoring/alerting of group level thresholds, as opposed to individual server thresholds?

Can you manage VMWare OS running on non-HP servers?


Sorry for so many questions, but these should be a sinch for the HPSIM gurus here and a good way to get the ball rolling on my investigation!


Cheers
Don

[Igor Karasik]

HPSIM use SNMP and WBEM/WMI to manage not-HP systems.
"Can you get monitoring/alerting of group level thresholds, as opposed to individual server thresholds?"
Yes, you can set group level thresholds

See this recent thread for more information
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=991128
and
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=629860