couchdb file size become huge on Chef Server

Solution: compact couchdb file (/var/lib/couchdb/chef.couch) used by Chef Server

$ curl -H “Content-Type: application/json” -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact

ref: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/CouchDB+Administration+for+Chef+Server

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IBM Systems Director 6.2 startup becomes much faster

The recently released IBM Systems Director 6.2 becomes much much faster when startup.

Director 6.1 takes about 10 minutes to become “Active” status after running  smstart on a 2G Mem/2.6G Dual core x86 Linux.  Now Director 6.2 only takes about 5 minutes. Great performance improvement!

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IBM® Systems Director 6.2 is released today

IBM Systems Director provides systems management personnel with a single-point-of-control, helping reduce IT management complexity and cost.

IBM® Systems Director 6.2 is released today as well as various plug-ins such as Active Energy Manager 4.3, VMControl 2.3, Network Control 1.2, Service and Support Manager 6.2, etc. which can be downloaded from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/software/director/resources.html .

What’s new in version 6.2.0

IBM® Systems Director Version 6.2.0 provides many new features and enhancements, including IPv6 compliance, new hardware support, new Web browser support, new Operating System support, new storage support, functional enhancements, and so on.

IBM® Systems Director Overview

IBM® Systems Director is a platform-management foundation that streamlines the way you manage physical and virtual systems across a heterogeneous environment. By using industry standards, IBM Systems Director supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM x86 platforms.

Through a single user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for viewing managed systems, determining how these systems relate to one another, and identifying their statuses, thus helping to correlate technical resources with business needs. A set of common tasks included with IBM Systems Director provides many of the core capabilities required for basic management, which means instant out-of-the-box business value. These common tasks include discovery, inventory, configuration, system health, monitoring, updates, event notification and automation across managed systems.

IBM Systems Director’s Web and command-line interfaces provide a consistent interface focused on driving these common tasks and capabilities:

• Discovering, navigating and visualizing systems on the network with the detailed inventory and relationships to the other network resources
• Notifying users of problems that occur on system and ability to drill down to the source of the problem
• Notifying users when systems need updates and distributing and installing updates on a schedule
• Analyzing real-time data for systems and setting critical thresholds that notify the administrator of emerging problems
• Configuring settings of a single system and creating a configuration plan that can apply those settings to multiple systems
• Updating installed plug-ins to add new features and function to the base capabilities
• Managing the lifecycle of virtual resources

Cited from IBM Systems Director 6.2 Information Center

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IBM Systems Director

Question:
What is IBM Systems Director?
Answer:
IBM Systems Director is IBM’s family of platform management solutions designed to provide IT professionals with the tools they need to virtualize more and manage less of their IT infrastructure. Through IBM Systems Director, customers will be able to manage both physical and virtual IT resources spanning servers, storage and networking. As virtualization becomes more pervasive, IT professionals require a unified management solution that allows for fast and easy monitoring, provisioning and automation of the physical and virtualized resources across their IT infrastructure. The IBM Systems Director family helps address these needs through modular, industry standards based solutions that provide IT professionals with the help they need to more efficiently and effectively manage their IT environment.

Question:
What are the key things people should know about IBM Systems Director family?
Answer:
I. IBM Systems Director family intended to help clients virtualize more and manage less

II. IBM Systems Director family unifies under one strategy, IBM’s server and storage management solutions and builds on this foundation to provide new virtualization management support, with the goal of helping clients to manage physical and virtual resources together across multiple, heterogeneous systems.

III. IBM Systems Director family is a modular, open standards based solution that includes a base set of capabilities for businesses of all sizes, platform specific extensions, and optional value added extensions for more advanced capabilities.

IV. The IBM Systems Director family includes value added extensions which range in capabilities from: workload management (EWLM); usage metering and accounting (IUAM); and advanced monitoring (ITM) from IBM. In addition, IBM Systems Director’s support of industry standards allows for the delivery of 3rd party value added extensions

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