Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment

Chapter 8: Managing the Virtual Server Environment

HP is not the only vendor with partitioning solutions or instant capacity solutions. However, HP does

offer more choices in these areas, allowing customers to use the right technology to do the job.

What really differentiates HP partitioning solutions and sets them above our competitors are HP’s

capabilities to automate, plan, and manage the virtualized environment.

HP Virtualization Manager

As a plug-in to HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM), the Virtualization Manager software provides a

central point of control for managing all of the resources in your VSE. Virtualization Manager

leverages functionality within HP SIM to provide auto-discovery and role based security for more

efficient system administration. Virtualization Manager has an easy-to-use interface that lets you see

all of your available virtual resources, how they’re being used, and how they relate to your physical

infrastructure in a contextual graphical view. It is seamlessly integrated with the management tools

necessary to manage both your physical and virtual infrastructure for the HP Integrity, BladeSystem,

and ProLiant platforms.

Virtualization Manager is also integrated with Capacity Advisor and gWLM to help you plan and

automate resource sharing in your VSE. And as of January, 2009 Virtualization Manager is

integrated with the new technology called logical servers, which we will explain later in this chapter.

HP Capacity Advisor

Capacity Advisor is an easy-to-use capacity-planning tool. It captures performance data and then

allows you to graphically view the historical utilization data. Unlike many other capacity planning

tools, Capacity Advisor captures more than just CPU and memory utilization data. Capacity Advisor

also captures networking I/O, disk I/O, and power consumption data. It collects more than a

thousand data points per server per day for up to 4 years, which improves the quality of analysis and

allows you to see and understand trends over time.

For example, the graph in Figure 1 was taken from Capacity Advisor. By using the information in this

graph, you can easily determine that only 3 CPUs are required to handle the sustained peak load the

majority of the time. The remainder of the CPU resources can be shared by either moving CPU

resources from another partition or by activating TiCAP cores. If you have several different

workloads, you can create scenarios for combining them into the same nPartition by using Virtual

Partitions or Integrity Virtual Machines. In this way, you can determine how many resources are

required based on the historical performance data captured by Capacity Advisor. This allows you to

size for the “peak of the sums” and not the “sum of the peaks.” That is, when you combine the

workloads, you look for the total CPU demand of the combined workloads. Since the workloads

probably won’t peak at the same time, you size for the peak of the combined workloads.

Another significant benefit of Capacity Advisor is that you can use it to create “what if” scenarios that

allow you to match workloads with various configurations in order to choose the one that works the

best in your environment. In the Scenario Editor, you can manually create hypothetical servers and

move workloads onto them. An innovative 5-star rating system will help you determine the optimum

workload placement. Or, you can use the built in “Smart Solver” technology to automatically

consolidate and load balance your workloads to servers or virtual machines. Comparison reports

can be generated to compare the results of different consolidation scenarios, including power