Agents

IBM® Flex System Manager management software provides a central point of control for aggregating and managing discovered systems based on a service-oriented architecture. The management software includes two operating-system agents: Common Agent and Platform Agent.

The operating-system agents serve as the control point for accessing operating system and host information that might not be accessible through an out-of-band interface. These agents run on operating-system-based and hardware-based endpoints, called systems, that can be discovered and managed by the management software. The level of system management depends on the agent that is installed on the system: Common Agent or Platform Agent. Each agent provides a different footprint size, level of performance, and set of management functions.

The management software can discover and manage some systems on which neither of these operating-system agents is installed, but the level of management is limited.

Important: If your IBM Flex System hardware consists only of X-Architecture compute nodes, and you use management software for basic hardware management, such as firmware updates, you might not need Common Agent or Platform Agent. If you have IBM Power Systems™ compute nodes, or you need virtualization or file management, you might need Platform Agent, Common Agent services, or both.

For Platform Agent, a web-connected management node installs and updates agents automatically. For Common Agent, the installation and update processes are always manual; you must download, import, and install them manually. For more information about installing and managing agents, see Installing and managing agents.