Solaris Management Console

Solaris Management Console

Solaris Management Console, aka Viper, was a Java Swing based application. I was the lead designer on the console. Other colleagues at Sun worked on the tools. The console was a bit like a browser. The tools were like applets. You could create a hierarchical view of tools that came from multiple different servers.

Early Version

Another early version

SMC displayed inside MMC (Microsoft Management Console) - wrap your heads around that one :-).

Nomenclature

In addition to the terms described below, there was the notion of tools (similar to MMC snap-ins). The tools were placed in categories described in an XML file called a tool box. The location of the tools was determined by a card sort test.

Solaris Management Console 2.1

This screen shows the home toolbox (similar to the home page in a browser). It is the toolbox that is loaded into the SMC when the user first logs in. The user could create a single toolbox with tools from multiple different computers. When a user clicked on a tool from a different computer, the code for the tool would be loaded into the SMC.

Processes

The tool which displays the running processes on the system.

System Information