Chapter Overview

What do your power bill, your water bill, and your computer hardware bill all have in common? Answer: all three of these utilities can be billed based on the amount of resources you consume. This seems normal for your water bill and power bill, but paying for computer hardware based on usage? HP's Pay per use (PPU) solution enables customers to lease computer hardware with a variable payment based on actual use of the system.

HP's Virtual Server Environment combined with the PPU solution delivers the ability to treat a data center as a utility. When the workloads demand greater computing resources, the resources are ready and waiting. When the demand for resources decreases, the PPU solution tracks the decline and the lease payment reflects the levels of demand and utilization.

PPU is a very simple technology from a system administration point of view. During the initial configuration of the system, software must be installed and configured. After those steps are complete, the PPU software needs very little, if any, administrator attention. The only exception to this rule is the CPU capping feature, which sets the maximum number of CPUs that should be active. This chapter begins with an overview of the PPU product and then walks through the process of configuring a PPU system to ensure proper utilization reporting.