Top Ten Tips for Using Integrity Virtual Machines

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#3 – Use Multipath or RAID Technology on the VM Host,
Not the Guest
Symptoms: Functionality
Multipathing or RAID technology doesn’t work as expected. For example, mirroring on the VM didn’t
help whenever one of the virtual hard drives was ‘lost.’
Prevention and Treatment
Multipath technologies address physical connections to storage and are not applicable to virtual
machines. Similarly RAID functionality applies to physical storage units.
Use multipathing and RAID technologies on the VM Host and use only the ‘primary’ path as a virtual
hard drive. The multipathing or RAID technology on the VM Host will protect against link failures and
the virtual machines benefit indirectly. See the white paper “Best Practices for Integrity VM” for more
information.
#4 – Install the Required Patches on the VM Host
Symptoms: Performance, Reliability
The guest OS or its applications perform poorly. CPU resource allocation to the virtual machines may
not correctly correspond to entitlements for those virtual machines.
Prevention and Treatment
Consult the Integrity VM release notes (always available on docs.hp.com) for the set of patches
required by Integrity VM.
As noted above, newer Integrity servers with Montecito processors will need the HWE bundle
installed on the VM Host and guests.
#5 – Configure Sufficient Swap Space on the VM Host
Symptoms: Functionality
A virtual machine won’t start, the failure usually accompanied by the message:
Warning 1: Insufficient swap resource for guest.
These problems may prevent HPVM guest vm-name from booting.
hpvmstart: Unable to continue.
Prevention and Treatment
This is typically due to the VM Host having insufficient swap space. An Integrity VM Host system must
have swap space that is at least 4GB larger than the total physical memory on the VM Host. For
example, if the VM Host has 64GB of physical memory then you should have a minimum of 68GB of
swap space on the VM Host.