HP Rolls Out Improved Virtualization for Integrity Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IT companies use trade shows and user group meetings to energize various announcements, and Hewlett Packard was all set to use the HP Technology Forum this week in New Orleans as a means of talking about new products and services it was delivering to customers. But Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans and wiped the city out, and that was the end of Technology Forum. But HP is persevering and still did its announcements yesterday, which were focused on enhancements to the virtualization technologies in its Itanium-based Integrity server line.

The announcements that HP made yesterday are a continuation of a substantial reworking of the virtualization features originally developed for its HP 9000 Unix servers, which are based on the companies own PA-RISC processors. The nPar hardware partitions, which chop up servers at the cell board level, and vPar partitions, which allow virtualized partitions at the CPU level, were two of the key features that gave HP a leg up on its rivals in the Unix market, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and the Digital unit of the former Compaq (which was eaten by HP in 2001). Over time, HP's virtualization technologies have become more sophisticated and have been ported (as much as is possible) over to the Itanium-based Integrity servers, which support Windows, Linux, and now OpenVMS as well as HP's own HP-UX Unix variant. To make all of the virtualization technologies (including capacity on demand and utility pricing) as well as its high availability and systems management tools easier to talk about, HP slapped the name Virtual Server Environment (VSE) on all of them as a collection.

In August 2004, HP created two different VSE bundles: VSE Standard Suite and a VSE Mission Critical Suite. These bundles mirrored the way that the HP-UX 11i operating system is itself packaged and priced. VSE Standard Suite includes the basic partitioning and system management for those partitions, while the VSE Mission Critical includes HP's MC ServiceGuard clustering for Unix and Linux and GlancePak performance monitoring capabilities that HP has developed for its HP-UX Unix platform. The VSE packages were available in late 2004. Both VSE stacks ran on HP 9000 and Integrity servers, supporting HP-UX on the former and HP-UX and Linux on the latter with promises for eventual Windows and OpenVMS support. The key feature of VSE is the Global Work Load Manager (gWLM), a port of HP-UX's Work Load Manager (WLM) Unix workload scheduler that HP has ported to the Integrity line and is used to manage networks of HP 9000 and Integrity machines or the hundreds of vPar and nPar partitions that can be set up on a single big box (or across many boxes).

Last August, HP also said it would deliver sub-processor virtual machine partitioning on the Integrity and PA-RISC servers; these CPU slices can be as small as 1/20th of a processor and that can be as large as eight processors. Each vPar in the new VSE offering running on the Integrity machines can run a single instance of HP-UX, Linux, or Windows, and with yesterday's announcements, HP is delivering OpenVMS support inside vPars and is changing the name of vPars to Integrity Virtual Machines. The new vPars announced last fall and re-launched as Integrity VMs yesterday have shared I/O capabilities, which means that many partitions can logically share physical I/O devices such as disk controllers, LAN cards, and so forth. HP also announced a more abstract kind of virtual partition last fall called a secure resource partition, which allows system administrators to section off two or more named spaces in main memory for applications to run inside of (either inside of a vPar or nPar or on a machine with a single system image). These named spaces create a sandbox for the applications to run in that is similar to BSD jails or Solaris 10 containers. Hundreds of these secure resource partitions can be put inside a vPar, nPar, or single system.

It is not always easy to keep track of what is really here and what is just on the way with HP's virtualization technologies. For instance, while it is clear that Work Load Manager and VSE have been available for HP-UX running on HP 9000 servers for a while, it looks like Global Work Load Manager for HP-UX 11i and Linux servers will not be available until December 2005. Similarly, the Integrity Virtual Machine support is not expected until the end of the year for HP-UX 11i and will not support Linux or Windows Server 2003 until some time in 2006. The way HP was talking a year ago, they were right around the corner. As we reported in early July, support for OpenVMS 8.2 was quietly expanded up the Integrity server line because of significant customer requests; HP initially put it out on four-socket servers and wasn't expected to qualify it on the bigger Integrity machines until sometime in the first half of 2006. Starting yesterday, customers who want to buy a big Integrity machine and carve it up into OpenVMS partitions using vPars can do so. It is unclear when the Integrity VMs (which, again, offer sub-processor partitioning) will support OpenVMS. Global Workload Manager 2.0 will support and manage OpenVMS partitions as well.

Technically, Global Work Load Manager is called HP Integrity Essentials gWLM 2.0, which is itself a plug-in for the overarching System Insight Manager 5.0 tool for Integrity and ProLiant servers, which HP also introduced last year. With yesterday's announcements, there are two more plug-ins for SIM 5.0. The first is called HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor. According to Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing at HP, Capacity Advisor can watch how your applications run inside HP-UX and Linux operating systems using SIM 5.0 and then, based on historical data, make recommendations for the sizing and placement of partitions to consolidate those workloads onto an Integrity server. To make the job of setting up partitions easier and to integrate SIM 5.0 and the VSE partitioning software together so system administrators can set up nPars, secure resource partitions, vPars, and the new Integrity VMs for workloads, HP is announcing the Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager. Up until now, these various technologies had their own management consoles (which stands to reason since they were rolled out at different times on different systems), but now there is one plug-in for SIM 5.0.

Pricing for the Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager have not been set yet, but are expected before the month is out. Global Work Load Manager will cost $2,500 per processor core that it manages for either HP-UX 11i or Linux boxes (or portions of the box), and OpenVMS-based processors are expected to be the same, according to Van Der Zweep. Global Work Load Manager will also apparently plug into OpenVMS-based AlphaServers, and its pricing will follow that platform's License Management Facility pricing scheme. gWLM 2.0 will be available in December for HP-UX 11i, Linux, and OpenVMS 8.2, and will be distributed with the next update of HP-UX 11i due in march 2006. Integrity Virtual Machines will have the same pricing as vPars on HP-UX boxes, which is $1,708 per core. Pricing for the VSE Suites has still not been set, but is also due this month.

In addition to these tweaked products, HP is also announcing that it will price its systems software based on the capacity of virtual machines and partitions rather than on server-based pricing as it has done in the past. This new pricing covers HP-UX, SIM 5.0, Integrity Essentials, ServiceGuard, and so forth.) The exact metering--particularly for partitions that keep changing in size.

Van der Zweep also says that it will now offer five days of access per processor under its Instant Capacity On Demand (iCOD) utility pricing. Customers have a total of five full days of access to the spare processors that are shipping inside the machines, and HP is only charging in blocks of 30 minute increments as it is. The idea is to let customers with application performance problems throw some hardware at the problem and then see what happens. If that fixes the performance issue, then they can either buy the hardware or figure out how to tweak the software so they don't have to buy the hardware (if that is possible at all). "Why should we force customers to get their PhD hats on to try to figure out what the problem is," asks Van der Zweep. Makes good sense, and HP knows full well that if most customers are given the choice between throwing hardware at the problem and tweaking software, they will almost always buy the hardware. The five-day-free program just whets customers' appetites and gives them a way to predict the effect of an upgrade by seeing what really will happen.

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