Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

the compartment can be anything from a server with utility components, to hardware- or software-
based 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. The
only way utility resources can be applied optimally to workloads like this is to use automation.
For VSE, this means workload management.
Utility Resources
The ultimate goal of a virtualized environment is to create a compute utility in which resources are
used by workloads when they are needed, and then are released when not needed. Ideally, the
customer pays for resources only when those resources are being used.
Each workload is typically set up with a minimum amount of resources that are always active.
These are fixed resources. Additional resources can be applied to the workload when they are
needed; these are utility resources. It does not matter where those resources come from; for this
workload, they are consumed as needed and then released when not needed. This definition of
utility resources includes the reallocation of idle resources from one partition to another.
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