Chapter Overview

It's 7:00 PM. By now most end users are sitting down in their recliners at home, reading the paper. Not Toshi. Toshi has been asked to consolidate workloads in the data center onto fewer servers. Toshi logs into a few of his primary servers and begins to gather data. He is using HP OpenView to gather the empirical utilization data for each server, but Toshi fully understands the usage patterns of the workloads in his data center. In fact, he probably knows them better than OpenView does. He knows that 90% of the web server use is during normal business hours. Additionally, there are several build machines that are only used during the night for automated software builds. Toshi understands that further investigation will only serve to confirm what he already knows. In addition, he knows HP Virtual Partitions will meet his needs. He can consolidate the web server and automated build server to a single nPartition. In fact, the size of the nPartition only needs to be the size of one of the current servers, not the sum of the two. Toshi also knows that he can dedicate a fixed amount of resources to each workload. He can then use the dynamic migration capabilities of HP Virtual Partitions to ensure that each workload has adequate resources during their peak utilization times.

The character Toshi and this story are typical of many system administrators and their weekly routines. A common issue in today's data centers is how to do more with less resources. HP Virtual Partitions play a crucial role in the process of consolidating servers and providing a dynamic Virtual Server Environment.

This chapter begins with an overview of HP Virtual Partitions and then discusses the planning process. Thorough planning for virtual partition configurations is a key step for success in the deployment of Virtual Partitions. The remainder of the chapter goes through an example deployment scenario for Virtual Partitions. The example begins with the planning phase and continues through the process of setting up a scheduled task to automatically migrate CPUs on a daily basis to meet the demands for each workload.

Throughout this chapter, the term "server" will be used to describe either a single nPartition or a stand-alone server. Virtual Partitions operate almost identically regardless of whether the underlying hardware is an nPartition or stand-alone server. The generic term will be used to describe both hardware platforms. The Virtual Partitions product documentation covers the platform differences in detail; refer to the Installing and Managing HP-UX Virtual Partitions (vPars) user's guide for platform specifics.