> Dirmaint sux... I would do it manually before using dirmaint... > Just my 2cents
Until you accidentally overlay your boss' 191 disk with another minidisk....voice of experience...8-). Manual minidisk management is a dead-end for production. It's too easy to be off by one and do real harm. The other major product out there is CA's VM:Secure (primarily for minidisk and userid management; doesn't know anything about Linux). Wrt to Linux specific tools, there is also Aduva's product, and Green River Systems also makes a set of Linux management tools. CA also claims that ACF2/VM and Top Secret are somehow in the running, however I discount them as viable; they're hard to use and fairly rare in VM shops (and rarer in Linux shops). DIRMAINT and VM:Secure are userid/minidisk managers only; I wouldn't class Levanta and the others in with them, as the other tools are fairly specific in their knowledge of working with Linux guests, and really concentrate on that function rather than the general problem of managing virtual machines. Of the two userid/minidisk managers, VM:Secure is clearly the superior product. It's vastly easier to use and set up than DIRMAINT, and the combination of both directory and security management in one tool is both simple and elegant, and if you have the other VM:Manager tools, everything "just works" together without a lot of fuss or glue. Why CA thinks ACF/2 is somehow better escapes me. Its biggest downside is the price tag -- it's expensive. On the other hand, DIRMAINT is cheap. It does the job (albeit somewhat arcanely), and it's preloaded on your VM system. Enable it, follow a page or so of setup instructions, and you're pretty much rolling. Also, if you plan to do anything with the z/VM system management APIs, the SMAPI interface to DIRMAINT is the most mature. IMHO: If you know you're going to need backup tools, console management, etc (and you will), the price tag for getting the full CA VM:Manager suite is a pretty fair bargain, and VM:Operator is probably worth the rest of what you'll pay for it. Insist on getting VM:Secure instead of Top Secret in the package, no matter what the CA droid says -- TopSecret/VM doesn't cut it. DIRMAINT plus RACF/VM is a distant second. The lack of integration between the security and directory management products is awkward (and the command syntax drives me absolutely up the wall for both products -- there's a weird sort of logic to it... if you're a denizen of the Lake of Hali or Rl'yeh, or some other source of Things Man Was Not Supposed to Know..) WRT to Linux specific management tools (which tend to build on VM:Secure/DIRMAINT to do the heavy lifting on the CMS side), there are again divisions: management of instances, and management of software deployment to the Linux guests. IMHO, Levanta does the best job on the instance management side, and slightly less well on the software management side (although v2 has improved that a lot). Aduva does a much better job on software management, but is weak on instance management. I'm still playing with the Green River tools, so I don't really have a good handle on what they can do yet, but so far, they seem more oriented to the software management side as well. Levanta and Aduva are on the expensive side (comparable with the VM:Manager suite), but I haven't found anyone yet who's paid full price. The Green River tools seem more sensibly priced, it's not clear that they are as comprehensive as the other two. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
