HP Insight Dynamics - VSE Business white paper

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server, you can simulate different workload configu-
rations on different sets of server resources. You can
automati cally find best-fit solutions for dozens of serv-
ers, or even more. And you can easily see which
alternatives use the least computing power, the least
space, even the least energy.
Then HP Insight Dynamics – VSE gives you the infor-
mation you need to quickly rebalance and repur-
pose infrastructure based on changing technology
and business priorities. When you need to deploy
a new workload, the five-star rating system lets you
instantly see the best place to put it in your existing
infrastructure. Using logical servers, you can then
drag and drop the workload onto a suitable virtual
or physical server that has free capacity. HP Insight
Dynamics – VSE supports leading virtualization tech-
nology, including VMware ESX and VMware ESXi and
Microsoft Hyper-V.
You can quickly recognize opportunities to rebalance
workloads—identifying servers that often push their
capacity limits, and then shift the loads to servers that
are often under-utilized. You can see how repurposing
infrastructure could make you more efficient. A server
that runs certain workloads at night, such as a back-
up application, might sit idle during the day. With HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE, you have the information you
need to confidently shift certain daytime workloads
to the idle server, so you can take advantage of the
open computing capacity.
This day-to-day work can make a big difference in
the life of your data center. You’re not locked into the
rigid allocation of resources. You can complement
your long-term consolidation initiatives with continuous
optimization of resources. You can initially deploy
resources in one place and then later move workloads
to systems that have free capacity—fine tuning your
environment on an as-needed basis. By optimizing
utilization continuously, you can save valuable real
estate, avoid costly expansion projects, and extend
the life of your data center.
Energy-aware capacity planning
Consolidate workloads for increased power
efficiency.
Power, cooling, and space are top expenses and
limitations in today’s data centers. Energy not only
costs more, but data centers are using more of it. It’s
no surprise then that energy expenditures are tak-
ing an ever-larger bite out of operating expenditure
(OPEX) budgets. And, regardless of the cost issues,
some data centers are having trouble acquiring suf-
ficient power to meet their energy needs. In this new
era, power and cooling becomes a key consideration
when planning a technology environment or adding
hardware to an existing data center.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you overcome your
power and cooling challenges by enabling energy-
aware capacity planning. It gives you the hard data
you need to intelligently plan for your server capacity
and power needs, taking service levels into account. In
addition to considering metrics on CPU, memory utili -
zation, and disk storage capacity, it helps your plan -
ning staff take a hard look at your power consumption.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE can show you the power
implications of different scenarios. For example, you
can run scenarios that show what happens under
different consolidation approaches and compare
different configurations to determine your best options
for power utilization. The software’s five-star rating
system helps you quickly see your best choices for
provisioning and redeploying servers in an energy-
efficient manner.
These kinds of insights ease your energy pains through
better utilization of power and cooling resources and
better placement of workloads. By quickly identifying
and consolidating inefficient servers onto fewer, more
power-efficient ones, you can reduce energy consump-
tion, cut costs, and extend the life of your data center.
Everyday high availability
Enable fast and affordable recovery and maintenance.
High system availability is now an imperative for an
increasing number of applications. If your business
depends on certain applications, it can’t tolerate
downtime for those applications. Yet in many cases
the use of high availability (HA) failover is restricted
to a limited number of business-critical applications in
complex, clustered configurations.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE changes the ground rules
for HA. It introduces the concept of “everyday high
availability” for a wide range of applications. You can
now protect more of your systems and shrink mainte-
nance windows using spare capacity that is fast and
affordable to set up, using existing virtual machines or
physical servers.
During periods of unplanned downtime, you can use
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE to shift workloads to physi-
cal servers or virtual machines at an alternate location
to enable higher availability for certain applications.
This is made possible by the use of logical servers that
can be easily created and freely moved across your
infrastructure. This is the same approach that is used
to enable an agile test and development environment.
It’s now being used to support a simple, everyday
HA environment.