HP Integrity Online VM Migration and GUI management tools

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Executive summary
HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) is a virtualization product in the HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
to help customers increase server resource utilization and reduce the total cost of ownership by allowing
individual operating system environments to share processor core and I/O resources. Integrity VM
allows users to specify sub-core granularity. Integrity Online VM Migration allows virtual machines to be
moved from one VM Host system to another VM Host system without service interruptions.
Moving a Virtual Machine to a different physical VM Host challenges the assumptions administrators
and management tools make about the datacenter—both IP addresses and MAC addresses are now
no longer tied to a specific piece of hardware.
The purpose of this paper is to:
• Provide a brief introduction to HP Integrity Online VM Migration (Online VM Migration), and a
variety of management tools including: HP Systems Insight Manager, HP Global Workload
Manager, HP Serviceguard Manager, the HP Instant Capacity Manager, and HP Capacity Advisor
that integrate with HP Integrity VM and HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager (vmmgr).
• Describe the supported and recommended configurations when combining these technologies.
• Provide an understanding of the limited amount of integration these technologies have at first
release and the implications of these limitations.
• Provide ways to avoid problems and solutions for commonly made mistakes.
The paper assumes that the reader is familiar with the HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM)
product.
Integrity Online VM Migration and management tools
overview
Features
Online VM Migration enables a running VM, its guest OS, and all of its applications to be moved to
a different VM Host without any service interruptions. Services remain active with no OS reboots or
application restarts. All I/O connections to storage and networks remain active during the migration,
leaving the change transparent to applications and users.
Using Online VM Migration allows an administrator to patch, update or reconfigure VM Hosts, as
well as balance server (host) loads. The functionality can be used in conjunction with other HP tools,
such as HP Serviceguard and provide improved availability, flexibility, and performance
management. For example:
• Planned downtime events such as maintaining the physical VM Host server can be done without
stopping the guests.
• Virtual machines can be moved without interrupts to hosts with more available resources.
Online VM Migration can be performed through the Integrity VM CLI on the VM Host or using the
vmmgr GUI packaged with HP Insight Dynamics – VSE 6.0 release or later.