Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

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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. The greatest advantage of HP
virtualization technologies is that they have all been designed to work well together. You can pick
and choose which technologies are right for your business needs and be confident that the
combinations will succeed. In addition, you can implement new technologies later, when the time is
right, and know that they, too, will work together.
Summarizing the Choices
If you want to consolidate servers, you might want to consider the larger, cell-based servers, which
afford many options for partitioning. Initially, these servers might cost more than a one-server
replacement strategy, but when you consider the resource sharing potential as well as the ability to
quickly create new partitions and deploy new instances of applications, that strategy might ultimately
be more cost effective. You might also achieve indirect cost savings as a result of reduced floor
space, power, and cooling requirements.
Partitioning solutions are great for isolating applications for security or availability concerns. These
solutions are useful if applications need a different version of the OS, different kernel tunables or
performance tuning, or different versions of the application software. They also allow you to “right
size” and move cores between partitions for handling peak loads. Additionally, creating a new
partition on existing resources instead on provisioning a new server is much easier, quicker, and
more cost-effective.
Application stacking with Secure Resource Partitions might be an excellent choice for applications that
work well together and that can coexist on the same version of the OS. This can increase server
utilization and, in many cases, can save a significant amount of money in software licenses and
support costs.
With HP virtualization technologies, you do not need to size for unexpected growth or for peak
processing. Instead, you can use iCAP or TiCAP for these eventualities. If you need a high-
availability or disaster-tolerant solution, consider using Serviceguard.
Last but not least, you can automate resource sharing on your systems with WLM or gWLM.
Getting Started
Pick a pilot project and get started. Once you successfully implement it, you can add new
functionality if you need to, or you can start a totally new project. HP has designed all its
virtualization technologies to be integrated and to work well together.