Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

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. Any of these might require:
• Modifications to applications
• Deployment of a new application
• A new instance of an existing application
• An increase of resources available to those applications
• A wholesale re-architecture of the data center
With this as the backdrop, it is critical that IT organizations become more agile – more able to
respond to changes very quickly.
Virtualization in an Adaptive Infrastructure
Although everyone agrees that virtualization technologies are a key component of an adaptive
infrastructure, HP takes a somewhat different view of virtualization than that of our competitors. The
HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) encompasses technologies that many people wouldn’t consider to
be strictly “virtualization technologies.” HP takes the view that virtualization is more than just the
ability to pool and share resources. Rather, HP provides software to optimize resource utilization and
to apply those resources automatically to the workloads that need them. From this perspective, some
non-traditional virtualization technologies, such as utility pricing, workload migration, and high
availability, are included in HP’s VSE. In addition, the HP Virtual Server Environment software
provides an integrated set of tools to help plan, configure, and manage the VSE from a central
workstation, (running either HP-UX or Windows), using HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM).
HP VSE now includes a breakthrough technology, called logical servers, which brings the flexibility of
virtualization to physical Integrity blade servers. Logical servers are a new class of abstracted servers
that allow administrators to manage both physical and virtual machines in the same way. This
simplifies infrastructure change and increases business agility.
At HP, the most important goal is to make sure that the entire solution is integrated. It is not sufficient
to just have products in each of these areas. Customers cannot take full advantage of such products if
they do not work well together. HP has invested heavily in providing a cohesive solution that can be
either implemented as components or integrated with each other.
VSE Design Principles
The VSE is a suite of HP virtualization products and solutions that run on HP 9000 and HP Integrity
servers. As with the Adaptive Infrastructure, HP’s VSE is focused on the solution it provides for
customers. Some characteristics of VSE are:
• Workloads are encapsulated in isolated “compartments.”
• Workloads are installed once and can run anywhere.
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