More efficient high availability and resource utilization through manageability
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Executive summary
Today, most servers are highly underutilized. While average utilization varies by customer and
operating system, in the HP-UX environment, it is often around 30%. There are myriad reasons for
this, but one of the primary reasons is that customers often have one application per server, and they
size that server for a peak load of typically three to five times the average utilization. This means that
millions of dollars in server resources—CPUs and memory—can lie idle for most of the time.
Resource optimization, which is one of the goals of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, enables you
to consolidate applications on the same hardware but still maintain service level objectives (SLOs).
The Adaptive Enterprise strategy helps companies synchronize business and IT to adapt to and
capitalize on change. To help you realize the promise of becoming an Adaptive Enterprise, HP
provides virtualization technologies that pool and share resources to optimize utilization and meet
demands automatically.
The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) implements several technologies to deliver dynamically sized
virtual servers—each server intelligently grows or shrinks in size based on business priorities and
SLOs. HP Serviceguard—the HP software cluster product—provides users and applications a high
availability environment in a single, local data center as well as an entire data center. Disaster-
tolerant solutions build on top of Serviceguard to protect against site-wide failures of entire data
centers. Utility pricing technologies such as HP Instant Capacity (iCAP), HP Temporary Instant
Capacity (TiCAP), and HP Pay per use (PPU) ensure additional computing resources are available
when demand surges. At the heart of the VSE is the intelligent policy engine, HP-UX Workload
Manager (WLM), which ties all these technologies together. WLM performs real-time assessment of
resource utilization, then advises and acts in accordance with your defined SLOs and business
priorities.
Introduction
The HP VSE for HP-UX, part of the HP Adaptive Enterprise, provides the broadest range of server
virtualization capabilities, including clustering for high availability, disaster tolerance, high
performance, utility pricing technologies, partitioning, resource management, and more.
The HP VSE for HP-UX also offers an intelligent policy engine—HP-UX Workload Manager (WLM)—
that ties all these technologies together. WLM either advises the administrator to reallocate or
automatically reallocates system resources based on SLOs such as application performance, time of
day, CPU utilization, and more.
HP Serviceguard, another part of the HP VSE, is a tool often used on HP systems to enable high
availability (HA). HA is an essential characteristic for mission-critical applications—any time these
applications are not available, money is being lost. Whenever a mission-critical application becomes
unavailable because of hardware or software failure, Serviceguard automatically moves the
application to another system or partition. In addition to protection against failures in a “local” data
center, HP offers a portfolio of products to guard against failures of an entire data center. Whereas
Serviceguard protects against a system failure in a single data center, HP disaster-tolerant solutions
protect against a site-wide failure.
While keeping the application available is definitely desirable, the resulting mix of applications on
the new system might not use that system’s resources in the most efficient manner. WLM, with its
ability to automatically re-allocate system resources, enables you to get the most from your
systemsboth before and after the application is moved, whether it is moved to a different partition
or node in the same data center or to a different node in another data center.
This document explains the capabilities and benefits of using HP-UX WLM A.03.01 with the HP
software cluster products.