Chapter Overview


The Virtual Server Environment is HP's answer to the need for increased utilization and application isolation on large servers. Partitioning Solutions isolate applications on a large server while still allowing the partitions to share resources. Utility Pricing Solutions provide the ability to add resources to a server when it is convenient and remove them when they are no longer needed. And finally, management tools simplify the management and maintenance of this dynamic environment.

One of the side effects of virtualization and the flexibility that these technologies provide is that management of the VSE can be more challenging. You now have resources freely moving between partitions, workloads moving between systems in high-availability clusters and even virtual machines flexing and moving between physical systems.

HP has developed a new set of integrated management tools, called HP Integrity Essentials, to simplify the management of this adaptive environment. These include visualization and configuration, automation, and capacity planning.

Visualization refers to the ability see where all your workloads are running and what resources they are consuming. Configuration is the ability to create or modify the configuration of each of the VSE technologies. HP has put these together because the visualization and configuration of each of these products naturally go together. Each of the products in the VSE has a configuration interface.

  • The Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager is a new product that pulls together the visualization of all the VSE technologies.The configuration of all of the partition and management functions is being embedded in this product, in some cases by providing seamless integration points with the existing configuration tools, such as Partition Manager and the Integrity Virtual Machine Manager.

  • Each partitioning product in the VSE portfolio has its own configuration interface that can also be run independently. It is likely that this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. However, we will focus on the visualization and configuration management product in this book because that is the future direction of the integration of the visualization aspect of management. The goal is for you to be able to use this product to monitor all of the core VSE partitioning and management technologies.

Automation refers to the ability to automate reconfiguration operations so you don't need administration staff dedicated to monitoring the environment and making decisions about when something needs to done and how to do it. There are four management products in this space.

  • Workload Manager is the original automatic resource-balancing tool. It gives you the ability to reallocate resources in a Virtual Server Environment using service-level objectives for each of your workloads.

  • Serviceguard is the leading high-availability solution in the industry. It monitors the health of systems and applications and will automatically restart an application on another server when any service-affecting failure occurs. It can also be used to reduce any downtime incurred for maintenance activities by allowing the workload to be manually moved to an alternate server while the maintenance is done. Over time, there will be increasing levels of integration of the Serviceguard Manager graphical user interface product with the rest of the VSE management suite.

  • Global Workload Manager (gWLM) is the newest member of this group. It has many of the same automation features as the original Workload Manager product but provides them in a simpler package designed to support the IT as a service model.

  • Systems Insight Manager (SIM) is the management platform on which most of the HP systems management tools are integrating, including the new VSE management suite.

Capacity planning in the context of VSE management is the ability to get reports that will give you valuable guidance about how to take advantage of the VSE technologies for your specific workloads. The key product in this area is capacity advisor.

  • Capacity Advisor allows you to analyze data about your workloads to provide guidance about where to put new workloads and how to configure your resource-allocation policies for optimum resource allocation. It does this while taking into account flexing characteristics of the different partitioning solutions as well as Serviceguard cluster configurations and gWLM polices assigned to the workloads. This product will also be tightly integrated in the VSE management suite.

We will provide more details on all of these products later in this chapter and through the rest of this part of the book.



The HP Virtual Server Environment. Making the Adaptive Enterprise Vision a Reality in Your Datacenter
The HP Virtual Server Environment: Making the Adaptive Enterprise Vision a Reality in Your Datacenter
ISBN: 0131855220
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 197

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