HP Insight Control Virtual Machine Management 6.2 User Guide

2 Key concepts
Heterogeneous environment
A heterogeneous environment hosts virtualization layers, such as Citrix, VMware ESX, Hyper-V, and so on.
Insight Control virtual machine management supports the heterogeneity by providing a uniform way to access
and manage all the hypervisors. For information about the supported hypervisors, see the HP Insight Software
Support Matrix available at: www.hp.com/go/insightcontrol/docs.
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a software running on a physical machine, which shares all the resources of the host
machine, and has its own operating system.
Virtual machine host
A host machine is a system with a hypervisor installed on it to host virtual machines. A host machine can
have more than one virtual machine hosted on it.
Virtual machine guest
A virtual machine guest is a virtual machine running on a virtual machine host.
Failed Host Recovery (FHR)
Recovering virtual machines of a failed host enables virtual machines of a specified failed virtual machine
host to be recovered on defined alternate virtual machine hosts. The failed host recovery feature enables
you to recover virtual machine guests of a failed host by leveraging the ability of Systems Insight Manager
to detect hardware failure. It allows reacting to a VM host failure by moving SAN-hosted ESX VMs to a
preset alternate VM host. The following is the sequence of actions that occur:
• All VM configurations are restored from the virtual machine management database and copied to the
alternate hosts.
• The VMs are registered with the alternate VM host.
• If the VM was last reported to be running, the VM is started on the alternate host.
• After the primary VM host comes back up, the VMs are unregistered.
As the alternate host can be defined in advance using the Set Alternate Virtual Machine Host tool, it is
possible to bind recovery to SIM events and have it initiated automatically.
For VMware ESX virtual machines, HP recommends that you use the failed host recovery feature if you do
not use the VMware vCenter High Availability (HA) solution.
FHR in Hyper-V is supported for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 servers and virtual machines on failed hosts must meet
the following requirements to be recovered on alternate hosts:
• The virtual machine must not be highly enabled. (Highly available virtual machines are recovered by
the Microsoft Failover clustering feature in Microsoft Hyper-V.)
• The virtual machine configuration and disk files must be on cluster shared volumes.
• The virtual machine must not pass through disk parentheses RDM disk parentheses attached to it.
Handling Pre-Failure Alerts (PFA)
HP Systems Insight Manager can detect certain pre-failure alerts and generate corresponding events. Insight
Control virtual machine management uses VMotion for VMware ESX, XenMotion for Citrix XenServer, and
Live Move capability for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 servers as event handlers for these events, so that the virtual
machine can be moved to an alternate host before the system fails or is placed in maintenance mode.
Heterogeneous environment 13