HP Implementing a Virtual Server Environmen Getting Started Guide
Implementing a Virtual Server Environment:
Getting Started
Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 2: Assessing and Planning....................................................................................................... 4
Long-term roadmap .......................................................................................................................... 4
Short-term roadmap.......................................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 3: Understanding the Choices for Virtualization Technologies...................................................... 6
Partitioning Solutions: ....................................................................................................................... 6
Why choose nPartitions (nPars)? ........................................................................................................ 6
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 6
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 6
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 6
Why choose Virtual Partitions (vPars)? ................................................................................................ 6
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 6
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 7
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 7
Why choose Integrity Virtual Machines (VMs)? .................................................................................... 7
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 7
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 7
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 8
Why choose Resource Partitions or Secure Resource Partitions (SRPs)?.................................................... 8
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 8
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 8
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 9
HP Utility Pricing Solutions:................................................................................................................ 9
Why choose Instant Capacity (iCAP)? ................................................................................................ 9
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 9
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 9
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 9
Why choose Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP)?............................................................................... 9
Key Benefits................................................................................................................................. 9
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................... 9
Sweet Spots................................................................................................................................. 9
Why choose Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP)................................................................................... 10
Key Benefits............................................................................................................................... 10
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................. 10
Sweet Spots............................................................................................................................... 10
Automation Solutions:..................................................................................................................... 10
Why choose Workload Manager (WLM) or Global Workload Manager (gWLM)?................................ 10
Key Benefits............................................................................................................................... 10
Trade-offs .................................................................................................................................. 10
Sweet Spots............................................................................................................................... 10
Chapter 4: HP VSE Reference Architectures ......................................................................................... 12
Chapter 5: Identifying a Pilot Project................................................................................................... 13
General guidelines......................................................................................................................... 13
Chapter 6: Making Your Choices ....................................................................................................... 14
Determine CPU processing requirements for workloads....................................................................... 14
Capacity Advisor ........................................................................................................................... 15
Choose the type of partitioning........................................................................................................ 15
Choose the type of Integrity server ................................................................................................... 16
Utility Pricing ................................................................................................................................. 17
Organizing partitions and resource sharing ...................................................................................... 17
Automation ................................................................................................................................... 18
High Availability and Disaster Tolerance........................................................................................... 18
Implement the Pilot Project............................................................................................................... 19
Repeat the Process ......................................................................................................................... 19
For more information.......................................................................................................................... 20
Chapter 1: Introduction
Many customers have said that they like the concept of the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), but
that it seems complex and disruptive to their environment, and they don’t know where to begin.
Achieving a virtualized environment and a truly Adaptive Infrastructure is a journey, and not an all-ornothing goal that must be reached in the first implementation. You do not even need a completely
defined VSE architecture in place in order to start taking advantage of the many benefits offered by
HP VSE. You can start benefiting from virtualization technologies without introducing disruptive and
time-consuming implementations. One great thing about HP’s virtualization technologies is that they
have all been designed to work well together. You can pick and choose which technologies are right
for your business needs – both now and in the future -- and be confident that they will work together.
Note:
This paper is intended for readers who are familiar with the HP
virtualization technologies that comprise the HP Virtual Server Environment.
References to more information, including a white paper entitled, “An
Introduction to the HP Virtual Server Environment “can be found on the last
page of this paper.
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Chapter 2: Assessing and Planning
Every organization is unique and has different challenges and problems to solve, but all must use a
similar process. This chapter is intended to help you organize your thoughts and plans.
Long-term roadmap
The first step is to identify your organization’s business drivers and long-term goals. For most
customers, the ultimate goal is to create an agile and responsive IT organization, one that aligns with
the needs of the business and, therefore, is both a service to the business and a competitive
advantage. For this reason, it is important to understand the key business drivers and to think about
what you want your environment to look like in the long term. The following are some pertinent
questions and considerations:
• Analyze your application environment and some of your business processes as they relate to
the IT organization. Do you have more than one line of business, and does each line of
business or application group own their own servers for testing and production? Application
“silos” such as this are a leading cause of underutilized servers and server sprawl. One longterm goal might be to consolidate these applications and allow IT to provision the necessary
resources as they are needed. This approach can allow the application groups to focus on
meeting the needs of the businesses they support instead of worrying about the IT
infrastructure.
• Are you expecting significant growth in the business or growth through acquisitions or
mergers? If so, is it important to be able to deploy new applications or new instances of
existing applications quickly? Some HP VSE customers find that a virtualized environment
allows them to deploy a new application in days rather than months.
• Do you need to achieve a 24x7 environment or add a disaster-recovery capability? HP
virtualization technologies are well integrated with the HP Serviceguard suite of highavailability and disaster-tolerant solutions.
• Do you have to support and maintain many different versions of the operating system and
application software? Does your organization already have certain standardized processes,
or is each application group completely independent? If you consolidate and share
resources, what kinds of internal or “political” issues will you need to address? These issues
might not be trivial to solve, but it is important to understand them. You can address many
problems and pain points using the virtualization technologies within these “application
silos,” but in the long run, customers who can also solve the business process issues will
benefit the most from a Virtual Serve Environment and can achieve a more robust Adaptive
Infrastructure.
Short-term roadmap
As previously described, defining a long-term architecture for a virtualized environment requires
significant thought and planning, and perhaps even some significant changes in your IT infrastructure
and business processes. The good news is that the VSE architecture does not have to be completely
defined before you can take advantage of HP virtualization technologies. You may need to address
some pain points and solve some short term problems first.
It is clear that most companies need to reduce their infrastructure costs. The problems of
overprovisioning, underutilized servers, server sprawl, paying too much for software licenses and
support, increasing cost of power and cooling, and simply running out of space in the data center are
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common. Which of these problems apply to your organization, and which ones need to be
addressed first?
For most customers, any change in the IT infrastructure or application environment poses some level of
complexity or risk. This paper discusses the various ways that you can implement changes
incrementally, from those that are least disruptive to your current environment to those that represent
the greatest change and therefore provide the greatest benefit.
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Chapter 3: Understanding the Choices for Virtualization Technologies
This chapter describes the key benefits, trade-offs, and sweet spots for some of the HP virtualization
technologies. Understanding these will help you determine which technology is most appropriate for
solving a specific problem or achieving a certain benefit. Use this information as you decide on a
pilot project and assess the level of complexity and the amount of change that may be required to
implement them.
Note:
Most of the information in this chapter is taken from a book entitled The HP
Virtual Server Environment. For information about how to obtain this book,
see the last page of this paper.
Partitioning Solutions:
Why choose nPartitions (nPars)?
Key Benefits
• Hardware fault isolation (electrical).
• Operating system isolation.
• Choice of OS (HP-UX, Linux, Windows®, OpenVMS).
• No negative performance impact (in some cases you might see improved performance
resulting from less SMP overhead).
• Easy implementation.
• Dynamic cell OLAR (Online Addition and Removal) with HP-UX 11i v3.
Trade-offs
• Requires cell-based system.
• Granularity for a partition is at the cell level.
• No resource sharing across nPars (unless being flexed with Instant Capacity cores).
Sweet Spots
• Mission-critical applications that require fault isolation and dedicated resources.
• Need to run multiple operating systems on the same physical server.
• nPars are supported on both PA-RISC and HP Integrity servers.
• nPars can be a mix of PA-RISC and HP Integrity on Superdome servers (excellent for mixed
environments or during transitions).
Why choose Virtual Partitions (vPars)?
Key Benefits
• Dedicated hardware resources (processor, memory, I/O).
• Partition size can be scaled in increments of 1 processor core.
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