HPSU 2009 - Part 6 - What is OMi?

OMi - What is it really?!
There's been a lot of confusion (on my part as well, I must confess) about what exactly OMi is, and how it works. On the plus side, I've just had a great chat with one of the developers & two of the solution architects to help me finally understand what it is, how it works, and why you might want it.

First things first - OMi is a name only appreciated by the marketing team because it has caused mass confusion - OMi is NOT the next version of OMW in the way that NNMi is for NNM. OMi is a "layer-on-top" tool that enhances your troubleshooting & root cause analysis capabilities for OMW/OMU (and OML?) and comes as part of the BAC suite. By purchasing & installing OMi you get BAC, and must install & operate the BAC server. So this loops back to those still running OVIS and wondering about what they'll need to do about moving off of it (topic for upcoming post - OVIS migration to BAC).
If you want to make use of OMi you need to do a couple of things...
1. Have OMW or OMU running with all requisite SPIs
2. Get your NNM up to NNMi (unless you don't have it, then skip this step)
3. Install BAC & OMi (kind of one step...)
4. In installing BAC & OMi you by default install uCMDB, which must now be configured
5. Run the automated configuration tool to pull the data from your OMW/U tool to populate the uCMDB
6. Start to configure your dashboards and views

Of course, I've grossly over-simplified, but it's a roadmap to get you started. As always - if you have specific questions you'd like me to answer or thoughts you'd like to share on any of this please reply to the postings!

CMDBs Out of the Box

I've started to evaluate the software CMDB solutions from various vendors - HP, BMC, and IBM to start with. I'll be posting the findings of my research as I go along, but certainly welcome any feedback or input from those of you who may be looking at these products as well, or in fact may have already obtained/installed one.

The products I'm looking at in particular are:

• HP Software uCMDB
• BMC Atrium
• IBM Tivoli Asset Management

Stay tuned for upcoming posts on my research into these, including the hands-on lab work I complete.

HP Partner Enablement Galaxy - March Part Deux

Well, we've completed the third day here in "Nawleens" and my take is that PEG this Spring has been better than last Fall. I know Steve Myers took quite a bit of the feedback from the fall session to heart and it helped improve the sessions we had.

I've been taking the OMW8/SiteScope session, and we've completed the OMW8 sessions led by Lars Droeger from HPSW Germany. Lars was able to give a great hands-on experience as we worked through VMs of OMW. I stayed late last night to tackle some extra labs, but have felt that I've gotten quite a bit out of that. This afternoon we tackled DMA (Dependency Mapping Automation) which is effectively the automated connector between OMW8 and uCMDB. Dave Trout from HP was leading the DMA sessions. Unfortunately for Dave he was trying to get us to use lab VMs back at Fort Collins but the bandwidth out of the hotel was so limited that RDP sessions had screen refreshes that just c-r-a-w-l-e-d. I made sure to pass that feedback to Steve tonight.

Speaking of tonight, I should mention that Steve Myers sure can throw a party. It was the Riverboat Gambling Theme Party tonight for everyone attending and Steve & Opus (the conference organizing company) put on a fantastic dinner. There were a few tables with different gambling games, a live band playing Dixieland, a couple of gents from the Bayou with three 'gators to play with, and lovely young show-girls to greet us at the doors. Not to mention the open bar & fantastic variety of food. So, my thanks to everyone involved in putting that on!

Back to the learnin' an' stuff. I was able to get a lot of knowledge out of the DMA session with Dave Trout. HP's uCMDB is a powerful tool, but I'm thinking they may have it priced out of reach for most. Some of the underlying technology is impressive though, I was particularly impressed with the elegant "Smart Message Mapping" solution for replacing SPI discovered service objects with objects/relationships from the CIs in the CMDB. It's powerful, but a pretty expensive solution. Any of my clients can contact me for ball-park pricing. It does seem that the messaging from HP is that uCMDB is going to be core/central to all their major ESM offerings.