Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

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. Logical servers bring many of
the attributes of virtual servers to physical servers in terms of flexibility, and the ease of creating,
moving, and retiring them.
Logical servers can either be blade logical servers that utilize HP’s Virtual Connect hardware, or they
can be VM logical servers. Logical servers can be created by simply importing an existing blade
server or VM, or you can create a new one by using an easy to use wizard that guides you through
the process. Each logical server that you create or import will include the following types of
information in the logical server profile:
• Identity information, including a unique name, description, platform type, architecture (e.g.
ProLiant, ESX Virtual Machine, or Integrity), and operating system.
• Compute resources, including number of CPUs (or virtual CPUs for VMs), CPU frequency, and
amount of memory.
• Storage configuration, including server WWNs and storage WWNs for blade logical servers
or the shared storage information for the VM hypervisor for VM logical servers.
• Network connectivity information, including MAC addresses.
Currently, ProLiant blades with VMware ESX, ESXi, or Microsoft Hyper-V and Integrity blades (running
HP-UX, Windows, or Linux) are supported. Support for HP Integrity Virtual machines is planned for
early 2010.
Logical servers can be activated on a server blade or as a VM guest. A 5-star rating system is used to
let you select the best choice based on performance and headroom from a list of target locations.
Logical servers can be created and saved to be used as “templates”, which will allow for rapid
deployment of a new server. And if the operating system and application software had previously
been provisioned, the logical server could be up and running in the amount of time it would take to
boot the operating system. Logical servers can also be deactivated or moved very quickly to
accommodate the changing requirements in the data center. For example, on ProLiant, an ESX VM
logical server can be moved live from one host to another if Vmotion is configured. When a blade
logical server is moved or deactivated, the server is shutdown and it’s virtual connect profile is
unassigned so that the blade can be used for another purpose. However, because all of the
necessary information about the logical server is saved in the logical server profile, and because it
boots from SAN, it can be activated quickly onto another blade, even one in a different enclosure as
long as it’s in the same Virtual Connect Domain.
Some of the use cases for logical servers are:
• Reduce Time to Deploy New Servers: Suppose the application group asks the I.T. department
to provision a new server for a particular application. They specify how many CPUs, how
much memory, storage, etc on the “work order” or maybe these specifications have been
previously defined. So, I.T. could either create a new logical server with these characteristics
or use a previously defined logical server template, or copy an existing logical server or
template. Then, this logical server could be activated, and let the Logical Server
Management software in conjunction with the Capacity Advisor software find the best target
location using the 5-star rating system.
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