PTF processing has gotten more complex, but the tools have gotten better as well.

By Joe Pluta

Unless you're running one of the old beige boxes in a closet somewhere (and don't kid yourself, some of those still exist), then PTFs are the lifeblood of your system. PTFs for the i are a bit different than for most of the rest of the world; they're not the necessary evil of the Windows world, where you need to constantly apply fixes just to keep your machine from dying a horrible death and taking your business with it. Instead, they're usually more of a force for good, providing additional features and better performance, especially for the more advanced capabilities such as Web applications and relational database access.

System virtualization just got a whole lot easier.

By Tony Erwin and Dan Moravec

Virtualization is one of the most discussed topics in enterprise management today. The promises are great, but the prospect of managing the technology can be daunting to systems administrators. Those scared to jump into the world of virtualization can rest easier with the release of IBM Virtualization Manager 1.2. IBM Virtualization Manager is an extension to IBM Director that allows users to discover, visualize, and manage both physical and virtual systems from a single console. It provides a Web-based user interface that you reach via a well-known port on a running IBM Director server. Ease of use was one of the top priorities during development, and that attention to user needs can be seen in such features as these:

Cable clutter, white noise, and even your carbon footprint can be reduced via virtualization, but is the technology ready for prime time?

By Joe Pluta

Back at the beginning of the year, I talked to you about virtualization and specifically about VMWare. At the time, I wanted to see if I could find some way around the artificial limitation that IBM had imposed on my expensive xSeries machine (namely, that you couldn't run high-resolution graphics on it). The results were mixed; it worked but not quickly, nor was it particularly stable. At the end of the research, my conclusion was that for high-resolution graphics, virtual reality was a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I'm going to return to that product again, but this time I'll address a different issue: server sprawl.