Network Management Center Blog : announcement

Manage the downturn and thrive in recovery

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:03:00 GMT

I just saw that HP announced a new set of materials and offerings to help in the ecomonic downturn. I mention this here because ProCurve, the HP network equipment group, is part of this and felt it would be of interest to readers. But it is more than just ProCurve including Data Center Services, EDS services and others to lower operation costs. If this is of interest, you can find more information at Manage the downturn and thrive in recovery. This site includes videos and other articles and tools.

Launching the NNMi Portal - your one stop portal for anything NNMi

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:16:00 GMT

We have invested heavily in Network Node Manager i (NNMi) making it more cost effective for you to run and integrate with other products in the BSM portfolio. If you are an NNM customer and are thinking about upgrading to the new NNMi-series, this is the right time! To help ensure a smooth upgrade from your NNM 6.x/7.x version to the enhanced, innovative NNMi-series product line, we have created the NNMi Portal.

The portal contains everything you would need to upgrade to NNMi including white papers, webinars, upgrade tools, and license key step-by-step guidance. It can help you do a self-upgrade to NNMi or provide information on Services (HP SW Professional Services/ HP Software partners) to help with the upgrade.

The NNMi portal contains information and resources on:

» Top 10 reasons to upgrade to NNMi

» Links for recorded Webinars and whitepapers - e.g. NNMi Ready for Primetime: A deep dive presentation

» NNMi ROI Migration Handbook whitepaper

» License migration process information and links

» Do-it-yourself technical migration information

» Services information for NNMi upgrades for HP Professional Services Organization and HP Partners

Our goal is to create a one-stop experience for anything NNMi, and so this NNMi portal will be frequently updated with new goodies, so check back in here frequently, or sign up to receive updates on the portal.

Here is a quote from newly upgraded NNMi customer

"The transition from NNM 7.51 to NNM 8.1x was seamless and the results were better than expected. With virtually no loss of functionality and an increase in productivity, NNM 8.1x was an upgrade well worth undertaking. The increased stability and the ease of use have made NNM 8.1x a blessing for out department."

Frank Snyder, Network Engineer, INTERLINE BRANDS, INC.

So get started on the upgrade, and use our promotion which allows you to run your existing 6.x/7.x NNM version in parallel with the new NNMi 8.X until December 31, 2009 at no additional charge to you!

If you have any questions, suggestions, or want to share your upgrade experience, you can blog your request or reach me at:

Aruna Ravichandran

Sr. Product Marketing Manager, NNMi/NNM/iSPI

aru [at] hp.com

HP Software Universe - last call

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:18:00 GMT

HP Software Universe

(Formerly HP OpenView Forum and Mercury World)

Last chance for early-bird registration

Act now and save. Early-Bird pricing of $1,495—a $400 discount off the onsite conference rate—is only available until February 28. Register today and save $400.

Last chance to become a speaker

Submit a paper and join our other presenters in making the conference a success.

By presenting your success story, you can:


•	Share your expertise with a wide audience of IT professionals
•	Increase your contact with HP experts and customers
•	Gain recognition for your team’s accomplishments
•	Get one free full pass to the conference

The deadline to submit is February 28, so submit a paper today.

Follow Universe

LinkedIn - let everyone know you are attending - http://events.linkedin.com/HP-Software-Universe-2009/pub/32566

Twitter - http://twitter.com/HPSU09

facebook - coming soon

NNMi / NNMi Advanced / NNM iSPI Performance patch available has new functionality

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:58:00 GMT

Network Node Manager i (NNMi) 8.11 is now available. This applies to NNMi, NNMi Advanced and NNM iSPI Performance. In addition to a variety of defect fixes, we have included some new functionality. All of the new functionality is turned off by default, so check the docs to see how to turn on what you want.

Some of this functionality may have been discussed before but for completeness…

• Custom poller collection (NNMi NNMi Advanced) – this allows you to pick an OID you would like to poll and set a threshold. You can also define the state of the OID based on a returned value and have that state reflected on the node and/or create incidents. This is useful if you have some special metric you want to monitor and be alerted when it goes off your norm.

We had many requests for this functionality. There is a new doc just for this called - Online Help: Custom Poller for Administrators. In addition, a whitepaper called - NNMi Step-by-Step Guide to Using the NNMi Custom Poller White Paper. You can find these at the same place as all the manuals at the Selfsolve site.

• Application Level Failover (NNMi, NNMi Advanced) – this is the ability to have a backup NNMi system monitor the primary and assume polling et al if the primary is unavailable. This is useful when your organization doesn’t use a cluster technology for failover. Read the post on Application Level Failover

• Enhanced Network Automation Integration (NNMi, NNMi Advanced) – this includes a variety of integration capabilities but there is one I think is really cool – automated duplex mismatch detection. (Note this requires the iSPI Network Engineering Tool Kit).

• MyBSM Integration (NNMi, NNMi Advanced, NNM iSPI for Performance). What is MyBSM? It is portal in our BAC (Business Availability Center) product. NNMi and iSPI Performance windows are now also portlets that are usable by the MyBSM portal. In addition, you can create new portlets.

• Enhanced Performance Insight integration (NNM iSPI for Performance) – this is near and dear to my heart as I was previously the product manager for both these products. In NNMi 8.10, device metrics were added to iSPI Performance. However, the existing Datapipe that brings information from iSPI Performance to Performance Insight only brought interface data over. Now device metrics move to Performance Insight and are shown in the Device Resources reports.

• LDAP support - Support for users, passwords and roles from an enterprise directory service through Active Directory.

• Alcatel Device Support

• Migration tools to help you migrate from 6.x/7.x to 8.x

nnmmigration.ovpl - Runs on the NNM 6.x/7.x system and calls several other migration tools
nnmtrapdload.ovpl - Imports NNM 6.x/7.x trapd.conf definitions as Incident configurations. See the nnmtrapdload.ovpl reference page
nnmmibmigration.ovpl - Imports the MIB definitions from the NNM 7.x snmpmib file.
snmpCapture.ovpl - Lists the NNM 6.x/7.x community strings.
nnmmapmigration.ovpl - Runs on the NNM 6.x/7.x system to gather node group and background information about the NNM 6.x/7.x location submaps for one OVW map

You can find the patches at http://support.openview.hp.com/selfsolve/patches - Search for NNM810W_00002 (updated)

For the Network Management Center Michael Procopio, LinkedIn.com/in/mjprocopio

Join the other conversations

Operations - hp.com/go/ITOpsBlog

Business Service Management - hp.com/go/BSMblog

HP Software Universe and the big announcements

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:49:00 GMT

HP Software Universe is in Vienna, Austria this week.

We have a number of announcements we will make there this week in Business Availability Center, Business Service Automation, Operations Center, Service Center and uCMDB. The title of the news advisory is HP Unveils New Software Solutions for Better IT Operations Management.

Announcements

The Network Management Center (NMC) is announcing version 8.10 of NNMi, NNMi Advanced, a set of Smart Plug-ins and a number of new integrations. NMC is also part of the Better Business Service Management announcement.

NNMi v8.10 adds a number of features:

Advanced map support - hierarchical container views built from node groups
Thresholding on device metrics such as CPU and memory. Also checking status on items such as fans and power supplies
iSPI Performance also adds reporting on device metrics
Path View is enhanced to support integration (NNMi Advanced only) with HP Route Analytics software (RAMS). This shows directional equal cost multi-paths
Support for application level failover. This adds to the high availability support using cluster technology.
A new version of AlarmPoint, 4.0, is shipping in the box with NNMi 8.10
And an advanced version of NNMi with the creative name NNMi Advanced - which adds HP RAMS integration and support for virtualized networks: HSRP, VRRP and aggregated ports

Also announced are a set of new add-ons called Smart Plug-ins or iSPIs:

iSPI Network Engineering Toolkit - provides troubleshooting help. An embedded run time version of Operations Orchestration with run-books we wrote. A Find command to 1/ find where a host is connected to the network given an IP address, host name or MAC address and 2/ find all hosts connected to a switch. Trap analytics to help tune the management environment.
iSPI IP Telephony - discovery and management of Cisco and Nortel IP Telephony
iSPI Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) - discovery and management of MPLS including L3 VPNs, L2 VPNs and Traffic Engineered (TE) tunnels
iSPI IP Multicast - discovery and management of IP Multicast networks

And new integrations:

With HP RAMS for alerts and Path View in NNMi Advanced only
With HP Network Automation - synch of community strings, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the like. Notification of maintenance windows so that NNMi won't send alerts during scheduled downtime.
With uCMDB - first NNMi becomes the authoritative source of network CIs. Also, NNMi can query uCMDB to find out which services the selected object rely on. This allows the operator to know, prior to taking a device offline, which important services might be impacted.
With Operations Manager - bidirectional sync of incidents. This and the uCMDB integration together allow all for complete ITIL closed loop incident process
With Real User Monitor (RUM) - to determine if an application slowdown RUM detected is more likely to be the network or not

All of this together is what we are calling Automated Network Lifecycle Management that I covered in the last post.

The connection with RUM is a part of Application Aware Network Management (AANM). Our integration with NetScout's nGenius is also part of AANM.

For more information on all of the above, go to the Automated Network Management Lifecycle page.

Vienna

The Network Management Center is also on the demo floor at HP Software Universe Vienna. The NMC training sessions are:

Tuesday, December 9^th

TS-TU-1700/2 HP Network Node Manager i-series: Ready for Primetime, a deep dive presentation

- Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

- Larry Besaw, R&D Architect NNMi

Wednesday, December 10^th

TS-WE-1015/5 Automated Network Lifecycle Management Technical Blueprint

- Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

TS-WE-1515/A HP Network Management Center Advanced Workshop

- Pete Zwetkof, Product Manager NNMi

Thursday, December 11^th

TS-TH-0900/8 HP Network Node Manager i-series: deployment, migration and optimization

- Kevin Smith, R&D Engineer NNMi

BS-TH-1500/1 Users like simplicity; serve them through automated operations

- Thomas Edberg, HP

- Lars Erik Gjervan, NetCom, Norway

This post is getting long so I will end for now but I'll have additional posts on Vienna and the products later.

For the Network Management Center - Michael Procopio