HP Bolsters Virtual Server Environment for HP-UX

Published: July 13, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Every summer or so for the past several years, Hewlett-Packard makes some announcements that enhance the virtualization features that are associated with its HP-UX Unix environment. This summer is no different, and HP has tweaked the Virtual Server Environment for HP-UX 11i, making it more malleable. The company is also delivering a VSE reference architecture to make it easier for companies to deploy Oracle Real Application Clusters within the vPar and nPar partitions on Itanium-based Integrity servers.

Virtualization is not just a hot topic for server makers to talk about, but one of the key features that is driving server sales. According to Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and Integrity server software at HP, HP saw a 70 percent increase in shipments in the first half of its fiscal 2006 for its various server virtualization software products. The desire to get higher server utilization is one of the key factors driving this virtualization trend, because it can, in effect, cut the cost of server hardware in half. "I have never seen anything lower than a doubling of utilization in the VSE installations I have seen," says van der Zweep. Similar promises are held out to customers by HP's rivals in the enterprise server space, notably from IBM and Sun Microsystems.

By extending the capabilities of the VSE products for the Integrity server line, HP is trying to draw level with or get ahead of the competition, thereby making it a little easier to peddle an Integrity machine as opposed to a more generic X64 server from its own Enterprise Storage and Server group or similar groups among its competitors. The extensions might be modest, but every little bit helps.

The VSE collection of products includes the nPar hardware partitions and vPar virtual partitions for the Integrity and HP 9000 server lines, as well as extensions that hook into other virtualization technologies that are used for Linux and Windows platforms, such as those from VMware and Microsoft. The nPar hardware partitions chop up servers at the cell board level (which includes four-socket boards and their main memories for both the Itanium and HP 9000 types of HP servers), while the vPar partitions allow virtualized partitions below the cell board level. The original vPars could carve a CPU into two pieces, but the Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VMs) announced in September 2005 could make partitions as small as 1/20th of a processor core. The VSE products also include the software and hardware features that enable capacity-on-demand and utility pricing.

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 September, HP made some more enhancements to the VSE products, which allowed them to hook into the company's System Insight Manager 5.0 tools for managing ProLiant and Integrity Servers. Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor was a plug-in for SIM that watches how applications run inside HP-UX and Linux operating systems and then, based on historical data, makes recommendations for the sizing and placement of partitions to consolidate those workloads onto an Integrity server. Another new feature from last September was the Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager plug-in for SIM 5.0, which integrated SIM and the VSE partitioning software so system administrators can set up nPars, secure resource partitions, vPars, and Integrity VMs (these are the sub-capacity virtual machine partitions on the Integrity line only) for workloads. Before this time, all of these technologies had their own consoles, which was a bit of a pain in the neck.

With this summer's announcements, Integrity VMs can be bounced from one machine to another, similar to the VMotion feature of VMware's ESX Server hypervisor and a similar feature that IBM is expected to roll out for its System p5 servers and their AIX Unix variant within a few weeks. With the prior VSE tools, you could always move resources around inside a server to an Integrity VM, but now, you can move an Integrity VM to another server entirely. Unlike VMotion, which van der Zweep characterizes as something of a marketing gimmick, the Integrity VM cannot be moved with the applications running live. The VSE tools stop an application, move across a network to another server, and then restart it. "The Integrity servers are database machines with a large amount of real memory, and moving a large Oracle database is a bit tricky," he explains. There is a world of difference between moving a Web server from one machine to another, with a relatively low memory footprint, and moving a database with dozens or hundreds gigabytes of main memory. Still, van der Zweep admits that HP has a similar function for Integrity VMs running in the HP Labs, and he sees the appeal that VMotion will have to customers in that it can move live workloads.

Another change in the VSE software is that the MC ServiceGuard high availability clustering software for HP-UX and Linux is now Integrity VM-aware. In the past, ServiceGuard could rollover and move applications from a source database to a replicated hot backup of the database. Now, the software can roll over applications as well as databases that are running inside an Integrity VM to a backup machine. MC ServiceGuard is not an active-active clustering technology, where both halves of the cluster are doing work, but rather is an active-passive cluster, where the backup machine is waiting for something to go wrong with the primary machine and jumps in when it does.

The ServiceGuard VM supports HP-UX, Linux, and Windows, and will support OpenVMS next year. OpenVMS will require the use of Intel's VT hardware-assisted virtualization features, which are due in the "Montecito" Itanium processors next week. (OpenVMS, which has some of the most sophisticated clustering ever developed for an operating system, already uses up the four ring features in processors, and therefore needs VT to manage the Integrity VM hypervisor.) The VSE products do not, however, require VT features and will work fine without activating them on Montecito or on older "Madison" processors from Intel.

Finally, HP is delivering a reference architecture for Oracle 10g RAC that makes full use of the VSE features. Because of these changes to VSE, Oracle 10g RAC can now work through the VSE features to activate a new RAC node in a machine, provision it, turn on the node, and even deactivate it as a node when the capacity is no longer needed to support database workloads. This will come in handy, for instance, for week-end or month-end batch processing runs or busy buying seasons. HP has already delivered reference architectures for Oracle databases, SAP applications, and BEA Systems WebLogic and IBM WebSphere middleware.

The new VSE features and the Oracle reference architecture are free to customers who have VSE under as support contract.

RELATED STORIES

HP Rolls Out Improved Virtualization for Integrity Servers

HP to Bring Virtualization on Par with IBM with HP-UX 11i v2