Designing High Availability Solutions with HP Serviceguard and HP Integrity Virtual Machines

Executive summary

HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VMs) is a virtualization product in the HP Matrix Operating Environment (Matrix

OE) for HP-UX to help customers maximize server resource utilization and reduce total cost of ownership by allowing

individual operating system environments to share CPU and I/O resources. Mission-critical and business-critical

applications require high availability (HA) to maintain service level objectives, and the integration of Integrity VM with

HP Serviceguard can provide this capability for production, development, and test environments. With this mature and

proven technology, it is important to understand its capabilities and how it can be implemented to meet customer high

availability requirements.

The purpose of this white paper is to:

• Introduce the reader to the concepts of HP Integrity VMs.

• Describe Serviceguard implementation models that can be used effectively to provide high availability in Integrity

VM implementations.

• Help customers decide which implementation model would be best suited to meet their consolidation and high

availability needs.

• Document the use of HP Integrity VM versions B.04.00 and later. Information documented here may not apply to

earlier versions.

Integrity VM overview

HP Integrity VM is a software partitioning and virtualization technology available on HP Integrity servers, including

BladeSystems, that enables multiple operating system instances to run on a single server or nPar (hard partition) while

allowing these instances to share CPU, memory, and I/O resources. Integrity VM enables the creation of virtual

machines, which are virtual hardware systems implemented in software that represent a collection of virtual hardware

devices provided by a computer’s actual physical hardware. Each virtual machine is a complete system environment

containing virtual implementations of CPU, memory, disk, I/O, and other system resources capable of running an

operating system called a guest OS. Refer to the Release Notes for your Integrity VM version for determining guest

OS support. Please note that beginning with Integrity VM version B.04.30, Windows

and Linux guest OS are no

longer supported.

The VM can run any application supported by the guest OS and behave as it normally would on a single physical

Integrity Server without the need for recompilation or other changes. Integrity VM is designed to provide binary

application compatibility between native HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3 Integrity server applications and the same

applications running within virtual machines as long as the applications access devices that are virtualized by

Integrity VM.

Virtual machines require Integrity VM host software to manage the hardware resources such as CPU, memory, and

I/O on the physical system that is being virtualized and shared between multiple VMs. The virtual machine host

software runs on a standard HP-UX 11i v2 or 11i v3 operating system depending on the Integrity VM release,

which can be managed by a variety of HP-UX and tools such as HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), HP System

Management Homepage (SMH), and HP Global Workload Manager (gWLM). Figure 1 shows the hardware and

software components used by Integrity VM versions through B.04.20.05, from the base hardware on the host system,

through the Integrity VM software, and HP-UX operating system to the virtual machines running on the VM host.

The value of Integrity VM is found in its ability to help consolidate application workloads from multiple servers to

reduce the total cost of ownership for a server environment. This cost reduction is realized by reducing the total

number of physical servers required to run applications through consolidation while improving overall system

utilization, providing faster server provisioning and increasing the flexibility of system configurations. For example,

Integrity VM allows multiple virtual machines with unique application and OS requirements to share the same physical

server, which is also shown in figure 1.

Integrity VM versions B.04.00 through B.04.30 are supported only on HP-UX 11i v3. Integrity VM B.04.00 through B.4.30 all support virtual

machines running HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3. Consult the Integrity VM release notes for the support details for your specific version.