Xorux Is Gaining Traction With LPAR2RRD System Monitoring
July 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
System monitoring and management is a lot more complicated these days than it was back in the early days of the AS/400 or even the middle years of the iSeries. To start, there are physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual storage, and physical and virtual networking to deal with, and finding a tool – or a set of integrated tools – that can do that, and do it across disparate and incompatible platforms, is a big ask.
But a little known software company called Xorux, which is based in Prague in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, actually has such tools and in fact has been working on them for more than a decade. And, they are not only compatible with the Power Systems platform as well as many other commonly used platforms in the enterprise. They are also beginning to be adopted by managed service providers who are trying to manage diverse fleets of systems on behalf of customers who increasingly are short staffed and are looking for help.
We ran across a tool called LPAR2RRD when talking to Focal Point Systems, now CloudSAFE, back in March 2023, and had it on a list of things to track down and do a story on. It fell through the cracks and then another techie we know heard about it and jogged our memory to go track down this LPAR2RRD tool and find out more about it.
The LPAR in the tool is obviously short for logical partition, which is IBMspeak for a virtual machine. The RRD is a little less obvious, and it refers to a round robin database. RRDs are commonly used for system monitoring tools, which create a kind of circle of data rather than a stream, overwriting old data with new data as necessary. Hence the round in the name.
Xorux was founded back in October 2013 by Pavel Hampl, an AIX system administrator who worked at IBM’s offices in Prague from 2006 through 2012 and who also designed and implemented high availability and disaster recovery setups for Power Systems machinery. Hampl has been a software engineer and system administrator since graduating from Brno University of Technology in Czechia with a master’s degree in information technology.
As it turns out, Xorus has several tools, and many of them have open source versions that anyone can use as well as supported versions that have extra goodies for those who pay for support contracts. The Xorus stack consists of LPAR2RRD, which provides monitoring, alerting, billing, and reporting for just about every kind of virtual or logical machine or physical machine you can think of. Stor2RRD does performance monitoring and management for integrated system storage as well as for SAN and LAN devices. XorMon Next Generation, announced this year, is a new user interface that runs across LPAR2RRD and Stor2RRD; the prior generation was just called XorMon. All of these tools are free to use with optional paid support, with richer enterprise editions also available under license with supplemental software licensing.
This software has agents for AIX, IBM i and OS/400, and Linux platforms, and has monitoring for all the major server virtualization platforms, clouds, container formats, and relational databases.
LPAR2RRD 7.90 Enterprise Edition and Stor2RRD 7.90 Enterprise Edition were just released on June 26. XorMon NG 1.5 was just announced at the same time. The Enterprise Editions allow unlimited numbers of HMCs, CMC, VMware vCenter, Nutanix Prism Central, or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform instances. The freebie versions have limitations: two HMCs, one CMC, or four controllers for virtual server hypervisor clusters. The Enterprise Editions also have unlimited numbers of alerts or automated reports.
Now you know.
