HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

Hostnames

Hostnames need to conform to the restrictions imposed by the appropriate operating system environment. The

recommendation for specifying hostnames for logical servers is to choose a name associated with the operating

system and application, rather than a name related to a physical blade. The hostname will move with the logical

server. For example, the logical server may be activated on a virtual machine hosted by System A, and later moved

to the hypervisor on System B. Similarly, the logical server may be activated on Blade X and later moved to Blade Y.

The hostname chosen will move with the logical server (and through the use of Virtual Connect, the network and

storage configuration aspects also move, without requiring involvement of network and storage administrators). The

hostname may also be appropriate to include in the name of the logical server (if known at the time of logical server

creation), or the logical server name may be more descriptive.

The recommendation for specifying hostnames for iLO remote management interfaces is to choose a name associated

with the physical blade (since the iLO supports only that one physical blade). In some environments, it has been the

convention to select a hostname for the iLO remote management interface which is related to the hostname of the

OS/application environment on the associated server. For example, using the server hostname with an “ilo” prefix or

suffix as the iLO hostname. This is not appropriate in an environment using the flexibility of an Adaptive Infrastructure

to move the OS/application containers.

Consider a scenario with server blade49.x.y.com and iLO hostname of blade49ilo.x.y.com. When the logical server

currently hosted on blade49 is moved (perhaps to blade50), another logical server can then be activated on that

physical blade. This could result in considerable confusion if the new workload is now hosted on a physical blade

with an iLO hostname of blade49ilo.x.y.com and blade49.x.y.com is now on blade50. Thus, it is best to have the

hostname of the OS/application container be related to the workload, and the hostname of the iLO related to the

physical server it supports. The hostname SAP-DEV-3.x.y.com might be on blade49 one day, and blade12 another.

The iLO names might be based on their physical location (such as enc01bay1-iLO.x.y.com). Similarly, virtual machine

hostnames should be independent of their physical hosts, avoiding confusion when they are migrated from one

hypervisor host to another.

In addition to the hostnames, there are also names for the logical servers themselves, as well as names in other

management interfaces (such as a host definition in storage management software). The recommendation to have

names associated with the OS/application environment rather than the physical blade applies to host naming in

storage management tools, as well as hostnames. Choose names associated with the OS and application image to

be run on the logical server.

Network names

In the case of network names, the system administrator creating logical servers does not dictate the names, but rather

selects from existing named networks. Management interfaces such as Virtual Connect Manager enable the

administrator (server or network) to specify names for the various network connections made through the Virtual

Connect Ethernet modules. These same names are made available through the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager

(VCEM). It is recommended these names conform to existing data center guidelines (probably specified by the

network administrator). Similarly, VMware network names would have been defined. It is recommended the networks

be named the same in both VMware ESX virtual switches and Virtual Connect for consistency and easier management

across the two platforms. If using the cross-technology logical server capabilities (moving a logical server from a

physical blade using Virtual Connect to an ESX virtual machine and back to a physical blade), then the networks in

Virtual Connect must be named identically to the corresponding networks (vSwitches) in the ESX hypervisor hosts (to

ensure Matrix OE can correlate network connectivity).

When creating a logical server that will activate on Virtual Connect blades, the system administrator is able to choose

an appropriate network for connectivity. The network names shown are those that were specified in when configuring

Virtual Connect or were defined as vSwitches in HP Virtual Machine Manager (for the ESX or Hyper-V hypervisor

environments). Figure 3 shows the network names associated with a specific virtual connect domain group, as shown

in Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager.