Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

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.
HP Global Workload Manager
The gWLM product was designed to take advantage of the experience gathered from customers who
used the WLM product. It was also designed for a new business model that is becoming increasingly
prevalent in IT organizations: IT as a service provider. Some of the key architectural differences
between WLM and gWLM include:
• The gWLM product is managed from a single Central Management Server (CMS), making it
easier to manage larger numbers of servers and workloads in a virtualized environment.
• With gWLM, a single policy can be applied to more than one workload and on more than
one server.
• A primary goal of gWLM is ease of use. Most IT organizations do not have extensive
knowledge of the applications in their environments, so gWLM was developed with intuitive-
use models targeted for IT users rather than application owners.
• The gWLM product offers a number of standardized reports, both historical and real time.
These reports provide the service provider with information to manage the infrastructure, as
well as document how resources are being shared and consumed by client business units.
• As with HP-UX WLM, gWLM supports the allocation and reallocation of iCAP, PPU, and
TiCAP resources, but in addition, is also integrated with GiCAP.
HP-UX Workload Manager
The HP-UX WLM product provides the ability to monitor workloads that run on an HP-UX platform and
to reallocate resources as the loads vary over time. It supports workloads running in nPartitions,
Virtual Partitions, and Secure Resource Partitions. With WLM, resource allocation can be continually
adjusted in response to demand, and is governed by a set of rules based on business priorities. It
also supports the allocation and reallocation of iCAP, PPU, and TiCAP resources among the
workloads on the server.
HP-UX WLM has an easy-to-use configuration wizard and a remote graphical user interface to simplify
the monitoring and reconfiguration of WLM instances.
Choosing Between gWLM and WLM
HP’s strategic workload management product is gWLM. HP gWLM is ideal for both a large-scale
deployment with multiple servers, as well as for workloads on a single system or in a high-availability
environment. A typical example is a shared IT deployment where a single IT department manages
servers for multiple business units and many applications run a large number of servers – each with
several partitions. HP gWLM’s ease-of-use features include centralized policy administration, a library
of policies, and reporting features that enable IT to easily set up, manage, and track resource usage.
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