HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

Introduction

NOTE

This document was originally written for the 6.3 Insight Dynamics/Matrix Operating Environment.

It has been refreshed to update product names and links to other documents. Although the

contents and screenshots are based on Matrix OE 6.3, most of the information in this

white paper applies to 7.1 and 7.2 as well. Effort has been taken to point out information

that no longer applies to Matrix OE 7.1 and 7.2.

The HP Matrix Operating Environment solution introduced support for logical servers, and continues to enhance the

logical server capabilities with each new release. The Matrix Operating Environment includes infrastructure

orchestration and recovery management, enabling it to seamlessly provision infrastructure and applications, deliver

affordable disaster recovery for any application, and manage complete infrastructure lifecycle across multiple

platforms.

The HP Matrix Operating Environment is the infrastructure management at the core of the HP CloudSystem Matrix,

a converged infrastructure solution spanning servers, storage and network resources that is an ideal platform for

delivering shared services. HP logical server technology further enables system administrators to build a converged

infrastructure, delivering a new level of automation, simplicity, interoperability and integration to meet business

demands. Logical servers enable a common approach to planning, deployment, adjustment, and management,

whether the server OS and workloads are hosted directly on a physical server, or on a hosted virtual machine. A

logical server is defined by a server profile that is easily created and moved across physical and virtual machines. A

logical server profile includes the definition of the system resources (physical, virtual, shared, or unshared) which are

required for a given operating system, application stack, and workload to operate. Logical servers are based on

proven technologies such as HP Virtual Connect. Seamless integration ensures logical servers are viewed and

managed using the existing set of exceptional tools familiar to your IT staff, such as HP Systems Insight Manager. This

white paper provides best practices for managing logical servers, including:

 Naming conventions

 Storage configuration

 WWN management

 Boot from SAN

 OS deployment

 Supporting non-Virtual Connect servers

The specifics of defining and managing logical servers are covered in the HP Matrix Operating Environment Logical

Server Management User Guide (available at http://www.hp.com/go/matrixoe/docs). Additional information on

Matrix operating environment is available at http://www.hp.com/go/matrixoe .

Logical server overview

Logical servers are a new class of abstracted servers that allow administrators to manage physical and virtual

machines using the same management construct. A logical server is defined by a server profile that is easily created

and flexibly moved across physical and virtual machines. A logical server definition describes the system resources

needed for a given operating system (OS), application, and workload to operate (e.g., configuration requirements

such as processors and memory, and unique identifiers such as MAC Addresses and World-Wide Names (WWNs)).

This information is managed in software and can be applied to the creation of a virtual machine using hypervisor-

based software or to a bare-metal server blade using HP Virtual Connect technology. The logical server management

abstraction is shown in Figure 1, including containers for various OS configurations and the mapping to a physical

server layer.