HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager: Workload Management for HP Integrity Virtual Machines

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HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager:

Workload Management for HP Integrity Virtual Machines

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Introduction...................................................................................................................................2

Why Use gWLM with Integrity Virtual Machines ..................................................................................2

Intelligent, Automatic, and Diverse Resource Management Capabilities Mapped to Your Business Priorities 3

Intelligent and Automatic Activation/Deactivation and Distribution of iCAP or TiCAP Resources Based on

Business Priorities........................................................................................................................3

The Net Gain that gWLM Provides.................................................................................................4

How gWLM Manages Integrity VM Resources.....................................................................................4

Notes Regarding gWLM Management of Virtual Machine Workloads..................................................5

gWLM Policies You Can Establish for Virtual Machine Workloads ..........................................................6

How Virtual Machine Entitlements Map to gWLM Policies......................................................................7

Overview: Configuring and Managing Virtual Machines as VSE Workloads............................................8

Configuring VM Host Virtual Machines as VSE Workloads and Applying gWLM Policies........................8

Adding a Virtual Machine to the VM Host’s SRD...............................................................................9

Viewing the Behavior of the Virtual Machine Workloads Under gWLM Control......................................9

Practical Use Scenarios..................................................................................................................11

Scenario 1: Putting gWLM in Control of Virtual Machines................................................................11

Scenario 2: Taking Advantage of Instant Capacity Resources ...........................................................12

Scenario 3: Taking Advantage of Temporary Instant Capacity Resources............................................14

Scenario 4: gWLM Maintains Virtual Machine Minimum vCPU When Resources Are Needed Elsewhere.15

Summary.....................................................................................................................................17

Related information.......................................................................................................................18

Summary of content (18 pages)

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• HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager: Workload Management for HP Integrity Virtual Machines • Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 2 Why Use gWLM with Integrity Virtual Machines ..................................................................................
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Introduction Virtualization is a key trend in the IT industry today, making it possible to run multiple “virtual machines” inside a physical machine for higher resource utilization and increased flexibility. The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), an integrated virtualization solution for HP Integrity server platforms, enables you to achieve a greater return on your IT investments by optimizing server resource utilization in real time according to business priorities.
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As a result, you can easily make more efficient and effective use of your Integrity VM resources. While maintaining your targeted business priorities and service levels, you can consolidate more workloads onto fewer physical systems, reducing the physical hardware required and thereby significantly reducing costs. Intelligent, Automatic, and Diverse Resource Management Capabilities Mapped to Your Business Priorities Both HP Integrity VM and gWLM provide mechanisms for dynamic resource allocation.
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activation of HP Instant Capacity resources when policies are applied to individual virtual machines is supported in gWLM V2.5 or later. In addition, gWLM can synchronize resource management policies for virtual machine workloads that are defined as Serviceguard packages in an HP Serviceguard cluster, providing cost-effective, highavailability solutions. For more information about using gWLM with Serviceguard, see the gWLM documentation, available from: http://docs.hp.com/en/vse.
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workload. At any given time, the virtual machine is automatically allocated resources based on that policy. The virtual machine’s entitlement value as reported by hpvmstatus –r is actually the most recent allocation set by gWLM. (The entitlement set for the virtual machine in its configuration file for the Integrity VM software is not changed while the SRD is deployed.) gWLM prevents the virtual machine from using more than the gWLM-set allocation.
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• When managing virtual machine workloads, if Instant Capacity is available and gWLM needs to deactivate cores on the VM Host to make more resources available elsewhere, gWLM always maintains the minimum number of cores required for the VM Host’s virtual machines. For example, if a virtual machine has three vCPUs, gWLM will ensure that the minimum of three cores is maintained for that virtual machine. A virtual machine must have a core available for each configured vCPU.
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• The maximum amount of CPU resources a virtual machine should have upon borrowing—when the amount of resources owned is insufficient to handle the current workload, it can borrow up to the designated amount if resources are available.
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and entitlement configured for a virtual machine, and the third column indicates the gWLM policy that would provide behavior similar to the given vCPU/entitlement configuration. Table 1 Correspondences Between Virtual Machine Configurations and gWLM Policies Configured vCPUs Entitlement gWLM OwnBorrow Policy 1 25% 1 99% 2 25% 3 4 25% 25% Minimum Owned Maximum 0.05 0.25 0.99 Minimum Owned Maximum 0.05 0.99 0.99 Minimum Owned Maximum 0.10 0.50 1.98 Minimum Owned Maximum 0.15 0.75 2.
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2. Set SRD properties such as the SRD name, mode, state, and resource allocation interval, and whether to use Temporary Instant Capacity (the latter will be used in Scenario 3). To manage virtual machines, you must set the mode to managed; the defaults for other options are acceptable for virtual machines. (The other mode setting is advisory mode, which is not available for SRDs containing virtual machines, PSETs, or FSS groups.) 3. Specify workload and policy settings.
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Note also that gWLM provides helpful monitoring tools from the gWLM CLI: • /opt/gwlm/bin/gwlm monitor Displays policy, workload, and SRD statistics. • /opt/gwlm/bin/gwlmreport Provides “topborrowers” and “resourceaudit” reports and more. Figure 1 - Historical Data Report for Virtual Machine The horizontal red line indicates the maximum amount of cores that this workload can consume, which corresponds to its virtual machine (compartment) configuration of 2 vCPUs.
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example. Note that size/allocation values “follow” the consumption; in other words, gWLM maintains an allocation and size level that meets current consumption. Thus, the current policy for workload tara102 is performing well. For more information on interpreting gWLM reports, see the online help.
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use more than half of a core for its operations, and that VM2 and VM3 each do not use more than 60% of each core. In addition, VM3 typically does not need the resources it owns. To make this happen, you could set up the gWLM OwnBorrow policies shown in the table in Figure 3.
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Figure 4 - Complex with Light Integrity VM Workloads (Uniprocessor) and Inactive Instant Capacity Resources Now suppose several of the virtual machine workloads increase and the CPU utilization reaches an undesirable point, as in Figure 4A: Figure 4A - Heavily Loaded Integrity VM Workloads (Uniprocessor) gWLM allows you to form SRDs consisting of multiple types of compartments. The workloads in any compartments can then borrow resources from any of the other compartments in the same SRD.
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has deactivated one iCAP core in each vPar in nPartition2 (where there is less demand for CPU resources) and activated the equivalent iCAP resources (two cores) in nPartition1. The result is that the virtual machine workloads now have two additional cores to share their loads so that each virtual machine has all the processing power of a whole core to itself. You do not incur a charge for these extra (activated) cores.
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as needed, too. Figure 4C shows the net result when gWLM activates TiCAP resources for the virtual machines in Partition 1. In this case, the result for the virtual machines is similar to that of iCAP activation in the previous scenario; however, the three cores in each vPar in nPartition2 remain active. As a result, during the allotted time, more resources are active in the complex.
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Figure 5 - Multiprocessor Virtual Machines Assume that 8 of the 16 cores in this complex have iCAP usage rights and that there is no available TiCAP balance. Figure 5A shows that gWLM can migrate an active core (Core4) from the VM Host to make it available for vPartition2. (If a TiCAP balance was available, Core5 in nPartition2 would be activated without reducing the active cores for the VM Host in nPartition1.) While doing so, it maintains the minimum number of vCPUs configured for VM2 and VM3.
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Figure 5A - Multiprocessor Virtual Machines After Lending an Active Core Summary By managing your Integrity VM resources with gWLM, you can ensure that their behavior aligns more effectively with your business priorities. In addition, you can consolidate more workloads onto fewer physical systems to make better use of your IT investments and to reduce costs while maintaining targeted service levels.
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Related information The following references provide useful background information on related products and topics: • HP Integrity Essentials global Workload Manager (gWLM)—http://www.hp.