Introduction to Integrity Virtual Machines

Figure 1 Integrity VM extends the HP Partitioning Continuum
What are HP Integrity Virtual Machines?
The HP Integrity Virtual Machines product is a robust soft partitioning and virtualization technology
that provides operating systems isolation, with sub-CPU allocation granularity and shared I/O. Put
simply, Integrity VM enables you to create a virtual machine – a software abstraction that presents all
of the interfaces provided by a computer system’s hardware. Integrity Virtual Machines software
enables virtual devices by emulating them with real hardware devices. A single HP Integrity server
running Integrity VM can support multiple virtual machines, each with its own separate “guest”
operating system. As a result, each virtual machine (VM) can host its own applications in a fully
isolated environment. The physical resources of the Integrity server are shared amongst any of the
virtual machines it hosts. You can define virtual machines as single-CPU or SMP servers with the
flexibility to host many virtual CPUs on a single physical processor. The same is true for I/O – a single
I/O card can be shared by multiple virtual machines.
HP enables both flexibility and scalability with its Integrity VM technology. You can create virtual
servers with multiple, virtual CPUs, and I/O devices, each running separate operating system
instances with different OS versions, applications, and users. The result is a virtual machine
technology that provides increased hardware utilization and flexibility in server provisioning with
isolation, improved system availability, and higher capacity.
Clusters nPartitions
vPars
HWgranularity
Process
Resource
Manager
Clusters of hard
partitions or
servers
Hard partitions
within a server
complex
Virtual partitions
within a server or
hard partition
Resource
partitions within
an OS instance
Integrity VM
HW sharing
Virtual machines
within a server or
hard partition