SystemView ® Host Management Facilities/VM Overview

link System View Host Management Facility: General Information (GC24-5612)

What is Host Management Facilities?

SystemView* Host Management Facilities/VM is an integrated set of VM services that have received wide use and acceptance within the IBM Corporation. They were designed to make systems management for VM easier. These services may help you reduce the cost of managing VM systems by allowing system programmers and other system support people to do more work in less time.

Host Management Facilities can actively monitor the status of your application service virtual machines (SVMs), and restart SVMs it finds down. You can use Host Management Facilities to schedule and automate your system events (activities) at the specific times or within the time frames you want.

Host Management Facilities comes with a command routing and broadcasting service that simplifies communications between users, applications, and systems. After it is tailored to your installation, the service can look up how a command must be sent to a particular application (or across systems), translate the command accordingly, and send it. Systems can be nicknamed so that one command can be broadcast to many remote sites. You no longer have to think about communications protocols or command syntax. Just enter the command in your own predefined shorthand.

Host Management Facilities has an automated console service that works like VM's Programmable Operator facility. The automated console can filter messages or trigger automatic actions when it receives a specific message. It also offers enhancements over VM's Programmable Operator facility. For example, you can specify user lists in the routing table (RTABLE), so that the same RTABLE entry can be used to handle a similar message from a number of different user IDs.

Host Management Facilities comes with a cross-system single console image facility (SCIF) service, called the Aid facility, that allows multiple consoles to be controlled from the console of one virtual machine. When the Aid facility is used with RSCS networking, authorized users can monitor (and send commands to) consoles on other systems as well.

Host Management Facilities provides the means to automate the collection and consolidation of performance data on your VM systems. The data can be viewed at a dedicated terminal or workstation. Used with a real-time monitor product, Host Management Facilities also aids in performance monitoring, analysis, and problem solving. It can actively gather short-term trend information about how your VM systems are performing, and display the trends in graphical form at your terminal. You can set up Host Management Facilities to take corrective measures automatically whenever it detects exception conditions on monitored systems. Both single and distributed system environments are supported.

Host Management Facilities and SystemView

Host Management Facilities conforms to SystemView Integration Level 1. SystemView is the IBM systems management strategy for planning, coordinating, and operating heterogeneous, enterprise-wide information systems. SystemView is part of IBM*'s Systems Application Architecture*, and is based on open standards such as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), current IBM architectures such as SAA and Systems Network Architecture (SNA), and new architectures for systems management.

The SystemView strategy consists of SystemView-conforming products and the SystemView structure. The SystemView structure is designed to make systems management software more uniform, and thus easier to use. It advocates consistent user interfaces, shared data, enhanced automation, and increased integration among systems management products.