Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

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An Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

Chapter 1: HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure................................................................................................. 3

Virtualization in an Adaptive Infrastructure .......................................................................................... 3

VSE Design Principles ....................................................................................................................... 3

Chapter 2: Why Should an IT Organization Care About Virtualization?.................................................... 5

Overprovisioning ............................................................................................................................. 5

Responsibility of Application Groups for their Own IT Resources............................................................ 5

Variations in Application Load........................................................................................................... 5

Difficulties with Capacity Planning ..................................................................................................... 5

Severe Penalty for Underprovisioning ................................................................................................. 6

Anatomy of a Workload ................................................................................................................... 6

Other Costs Associated with Overprovisioning .................................................................................... 7

Key Components of an Adaptive Infrastructure..................................................................................... 7

Chapter 3: Virtualization Helps Reduce Overprovisioning ....................................................................... 9

Workloads Can Share Resources....................................................................................................... 9

Utility Resources Can Address Peaks .................................................................................................. 9

Flexibility Simplifies Capacity Planning ............................................................................................... 9

Virtualization Reduces Deployment Time ........................................................................................... 10

Chapter 4: HP Partitioning Solutions ................................................................................................... 11

nPartitions ..................................................................................................................................... 11

Virtual Partitions............................................................................................................................. 12

Integrity Virtual Machines................................................................................................................ 13

Secure Resource Partitions............................................................................................................... 14

Chapter 5: VSE Utility Pricing Solutions ............................................................................................... 16

Instant Capacity............................................................................................................................. 16

Temporary Instant Capacity............................................................................................................. 17

Global Instant Capacity .................................................................................................................. 17

Pay-per-use.................................................................................................................................... 17

Chapter 6: VSE Automation Solutions.................................................................................................. 19

HP Global Workload Manager ....................................................................................................... 19

HP-UX Workload Manager ............................................................................................................. 19

Choosing Between gWLM and WLM ............................................................................................... 19

Summary of content (26 pages)

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An Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment Chapter 1: HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure ................................................................................................. 3 Virtualization in an Adaptive Infrastructure .......................................................................................... 3 VSE Design Principles .......................................................................................................................
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Chapter 7: Combining Virtualization Solutions ..................................................................................... 21 Combining Partitioning Solutions...................................................................................................... 21 Adding iCAP to Partitioning ............................................................................................................ 21 Chapter 8: Managing the Virtual Server Environment.................................................
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Chapter 1: HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure HP has been promoting an Adaptive Infrastructure for several years. The goal of this architecture is to synchronize business and IT in order to capitalize on change. In today’s business world, it seems that almost every business decision results in an IT event. These events can be anything from changing a product’s price or running a marketing promotion, to implementing a large merger.
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• Resources are automatically applied to workloads as they are needed according to business rules defined by the customer. • If necessary, workloads are moved to provide better resource allocation or high availability. • Groups of systems are managed as a single entity, from a workload service and physical perspective. This requires a number of technologies.
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Chapter 2: Why Should an IT Organization Care About Virtualization? Virtualization has become a hot topic in the last few years. In the late 1990s, many companies were growing very fast and it was very common for IT organizations to deploy separate servers for each application that was required by the business. The end result was a sea of servers in most companies’ data centers – most of which were seriously underutilized.
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Severe Penalty for Underprovisioning A major reason for overestimating resource requirements is that the impact of undersizing a server is severe. If a customer purchases a new system that has insufficient resources to meet the demand for the workload, customers must then: • Purchase another, larger server, thereby increasing the cost of the project significantly. • Wait for the new server to arrive. • Initiate another installation, test, and migration project to move the workload to the new server.
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Batch Workloads Batch-processing workloads have a very different resource profile. They tend to consume as much resource as is available for the period of time they are running, and then drop back to zero. These workloads also tend to result in a tremendous amount of unused resources because they require resources to be allocated for the peak, even if the resources are not used while the batch job is not running.
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the compartment can be anything from a server with utility components, to hardware- or softwarebased partitions that can flex to share resources or to take advantage of the underlying utility components. Automation It is not realistic to expect a human being to watch a screen such as that shown in Figure 1, see a spike in the workload, find idle utility resources available somewhere else on the system, deallocate those resources, and allocate them to this workload before the spike subsides.
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Chapter 3: Virtualization Helps Reduce Overprovisioning Virtualization can help reduce overprovisioning in many ways. It is no longer necessary to size a server (or workload) for peak capacity or for unexpected future growth. The size of the various types of partitions can be flexed with HP Instant Capacity (iCAP) or Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP) processors.
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Virtualization Reduces Deployment Time Another advantage of virtualization is that new workloads or applications can be deployed very quickly on the existing spare capacity. Customers have been able to reduce the time it takes to roll out new services by as much as a factor of 10. The current process of acquiring a new server looks something like this: 1. Perform capacity planning to determine the size of the server. 2. Get funding approval for the new server. 3. Order the server. 4.
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Chapter 4: HP Partitioning Solutions This chapter discusses the partitioning solutions available for HP Integrity servers, with a particular emphasis on how each of these solutions can be made dynamic. nPartitions HP nPartitions are implemented in hardware on HP cell-based servers. Each nPartition consists of one or more cells, each with a physical group of processors, memory, and I/O cards.
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Virtual Partitions Virtual Partitions allow multiple instances of HP-UX to run on a single system or nPartition. This capability provides finer granularity than nPartitions through the dynamic reallocation of CPUs and memory between Virtual Partitions. Virtual Partitions are implemented by assigning dedicated hardware components such as CPU, memory, and I/O to each partition. Figure 3 illustrates how Virtual Partitions work. Rather than boot HP-UX directly off the hardware, the vPar Monitor is booted.
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Integrity Virtual Machines Another solution in HP’s partitioning continuum is called HP Integrity Virtual Machines. This is a fully virtualized environment for running applications. Figure 4 illustrates how Integrity Virtual Machines are architected. The VM Host runs on any HP Integrity system or nPartition, which means that you do not need a cell-based system to use Integrity Virtual Machines. On top of the VM Host you run virtual machines, which present themselves to the VM Host as physical servers.
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Figure 4. HP Integrity Virtual Machines app app HP-UX 11i app app app app Linux Windows app HP-UX 11i Linux app Windows VM Host Hardware Memory I/ I/O I/ Secure Resource Partitions Secure Resource Partitions is a set of technologies that allow you to run multiple separate instances of applications within a single instance of HP-UX while maintaining resource and security isolation between the instances. Some of these technologies have existed in HP-UX for over 10 years.
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Figure 5.
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Chapter 5: VSE Utility Pricing Solutions Utility Pricing Solutions can be applied to any cell-based HP server. The server does not have to be partitioned. However, the Utility Pricing Solutions are integrated with partitioning, so it is possible to use both if needed. This section briefly describes the Utility Pricing Solutions available as part of the VSE suite of technologies.
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Figure 6. Flexing nPartitions with iCAP nPar1 nPar1 nPar2 nPar2 nPar1 nPar2 Legend Inactive iCAP Core Active Core Temporary Instant Capacity Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP) gives you the option of purchasing a prepaid block of processing time that enables you to activate and deactivate iCAP cores without having to purchase the usage rights for permanent activation.
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used to calculate a monthly average, which is the value used for the PPU lease-payment calculation. One feature of PPU is that it gives you the option of deactivating individual cores to ensure that they contribute a net zero utilization to the average utilization calculation for as long as they are deactivated.
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Chapter 6: VSE Automation Solutions Two tools in the VSE suite are designed to help automate the migration of resources between workloads that share an infrastructure. HP-UX Workload Manager (WLM) was the industry’s first goal-based workload manager product for any Enterprise UNIX platform. The more recent HP Global Workload Manager (gWLM) is an evolution of WLM and was specifically designed for the “IT as a service provider” market.
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These benefits also make gWLM a suitable solution for many common types of IT environments where fine-tuned policies and specialized resource management are not applicable. HP-UX Workload Manager is designed to manage workloads on a single system or in a high availability cluster. HP-UX WLM is a suitable solution for a line-of-business (LOB) consolidation in which the LOB owns its servers but relies on an IT team to manage them.
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Chapter 7: Combining Virtualization Solutions A unique feature of HP VSE is that the different partitioning solutions can be combined on a single system. This provides the user with the flexibility to consolidate varied workloads with different isolation and flexibility requirements onto the same platform comfortably. You can use nPartitions, Virtual Partitions, Integrity Virtual Machines, and Secure Resource Partitions on the same system at the same time.
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Chapter 8: Managing the Virtual Server Environment HP is not the only vendor with partitioning solutions or instant capacity solutions. However, HP does offer more choices in these areas, allowing customers to use the right technology to do the job. What really differentiates HP partitioning solutions and sets them above our competitors are HP’s capabilities to automate, plan, and manage the virtualized environment.
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consumption and the associated costs. (You can specify the type of currency and cost per kilowatt hour). Logical Servers Logical servers are a breakthrough technology that bring the freedom and flexibility of virtualization to physical servers. They are a new class of abstracted servers that allow administrators to manage both physical and virtual machines in the same way. A logical server is defined by a server profile that is easily created and freely moved across physical or virtual machines.
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• Conveniently expand and contract application server pools: Suppose a company has an application consisting of several servers or nodes in a cluster configuration whose load varies over the course of a business cycle. By using logical servers, the operations group can “dialup or down” more or less blade servers to meet the changing demand. • Re-use server resources for another purpose: A company may have multiple Q/A or test systems for different applications.
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Chapter 9: Start the Journey Getting to a Virtualized Environment and a truly Adaptive Infrastructure is indeed a journey. It is a journey well worth taking, and you can get there. However, the undertaking is not an all-or-nothing effort. You do not have to have a completely defined virtualized architecture in place in order to start taking advantage of the many benefits offered by HP VSE. There are many non-disruptive actions that you can do to start benefiting from virtualization technologies.
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For more information For more information about HP VSE and HP virtualization technologies, see the VSE website at www.hp.com/go/vse. © 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.