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

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the PA-RISC line of HP 9000 Unix servers have had pretty sophisticated virtualization features, some of which made it onto Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based Integrity servers, Unix rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems have been working feverishly to bring out more advanced partitioning and systems management for their own AIX and Solaris Unixes. This week, HP will match the ante in the virtualization game with enhancements it is making with a unified HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium and PA-RISC boxes.

Like IBM with its Virtualization Engine hypervisor layer for its Power-based pSeries and iSeries servers, HP has created a single brand to encompass the virtualization, system management, and high availability features of the HP-UX environment, called the Virtual Server Environment, or VSE. (Not to be confused with the venerable VSE operating system on IBM mainframes--or, maybe to be confused with it, if HP's marketeers are trying to use subliminal association with that very sturdy and widespread platform.) IBM's Unix customers have been told for more than two years about the advanced, dynamic logical partitioning capabilities that they would get as part of AIX 5L 5.3, and they could see that IBM could deliver these technologies because the Virtualization Engine hypervisor is nothing more than a rebranded version of the microcode that IBM has been selling for years in the AS/400 and iSeries line of proprietary midrange servers. This microcode has supported OS/400 since day one and has supported Linux since 2000. What IBM really did with AIX 5.3 is prop it way up off the Power processors and slide OS/400's microcode underneath it to create a virtualized sever that can support up to 10 logical partitions per physical processor and offers virtual I/O out of these partitions and virtual LAN connectivity over memory buses between partitions.

For people familiar with the Power architecture and its Virtualization Engine hypervisor, many of the enhancements that HP will announce this week at the HP World trade show in Chicago--and roll out through the remainder of 2004--will have a familiar ring to it.

HP has had nPar hard partitions in the HP 9000 midrange and Superdome computers since the September 2000 launch of the Superdomes. These servers are based on a four-way cell board, and each cell board can be logically and electronically isolated from the others in the system, have its own HP-UX operating system installed on it, and function like a free-standing Unix server. In August 2001, HP announced vPar virtual partitions, which it rolled out first with the Superdomes and then cascaded down the HP 9000 server line. The Itanium-based Integrity server line has had static partitions for HP-UX and Windows operating systems at the high-end, and has supported HP-UX, Linux, and Windows at the low end. Only two weeks ago, HP announced that Linux was available on eight-way partitions on the 16-way and 64-way variants of the Integrity Superdome boxes through eight-way nPars. (Linux was not supported on the Superdomes until then.)

Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing at HP, says that about 60 percent of the high-end Integrity and HP 9000 servers that the company ships has nPar, vPar, or other virtualization capabilities activated, and says further that 50 percent of Integrity server customers make use of high availability clustering.

The new virtualization features will be packaged up in the VSE offering, which will come in a VSE Standard Suite and a VSE Mission Critical Suite, mirroring the way that the HP-UX 11i operating system is itself packaged and priced. The former includes the basic partitioning and system management for those partitions, while the latter includes the MC ServiceGuard clustering and GlancePak performance monitoring capabilities that HP has developed for its HP-UX Unix platform. Pricing for VSE Standard and Mission Critical Suites has not yet been announced, but is expected as the software becomes available in late 2004.

The first new feature for the VSE stack will be the support of multiple operating systems, something that separates the PA-RISC Superdome machines, which only run HP-UX, from the Itanium-based Integrity machines, their similarly architected brethren that run HP-UX, Windows, and Linux. HP has extended the HP-UX Workload Manager that keeps applications from butting heads inside HP-UX to cover hundreds of machines in a network or hundreds of nPar or vPar partitions spanning one or many machines; these machines can now be running either HP-UX or Linux. This Global Workload Manager, says van der Zweep, is a significant upgrade from the Workload Manager, which could only manage 20 machines or partitions. This new Global Workload Manager will ship before the end of the year, and it will eventually support Windows Server editions as well. Exactly when that will happen is unclear, but van der Zweep says that as soon as Microsoft offers APIs that are similar to the processor set APIs in Linux 2.6, which allow specific applications to be pegged to specific processors, then HP will support the management of Windows instances through Global Workload Manager.

To IBM's chagrin, HP will also announce this week that it will offer sub-processor virtual machine partitioning on the Integrity and PA-RISC line of servers. IBM has thus far been the only midrange and enterprise server maker offering this capability, which ships for the first time on its pSeries and p5 Unix servers in a few weeks with AIX 5L 5.3 and its new Virtualization Engine hypervisor. Up until now, the finest granularity that was available with vPars was one partition per processor. Now, HP is offering vPars that can be as small as 1/20th of a processor and that can be as large as eight processors. IBM's granularity on the new p5 machines is 1/10th of a processor all the way up to all processors in a single machine (which currently stands at 16 processors with the p5 570 but which will be extended to 64-way processing with the p5 590, due by the end of the year). 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 the delivery of OpenVMS for Itanium later this year, customers will also be able to run OpenVMS inside vPars. Van der Zweep says that, in theory, any Itanium-based operating system can be put inside one of the new vPars, which could mean one of the open source BSDs or even Solaris if Sun ever announces it. The new vPars also 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 is also announcing a feature for the VSE offering called secure resource partitions, 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 the forthcoming Solaris 10 containers. Van der sweep says that hundreds of these secure resource partitions can be put inside a vPar, nPar, or single system.

From the looks of things, HP is taking many of the best ideas IBM has with AIX 5.3 and Sun has with Solaris 10 and mixing them. This is obviously no accident. But the bulk of the new VSE offering will be restricted to the Integrity line of Itanium servers, so don't expect it to be ported to the Xeon-based ProLiant line of servers any time soon. Van der Zweep says such an initiative would require a major re-write of the code, given the substantial low-level architectural differences between the Xeon and Itanium platforms.

The ServiceGuard clustering software has also been enhanced with this announcement, allowing Itanium and PA-RISC servers to be clustered for the first time. (Presumably both types of machines will have to be configured with HP-UX 11i v2, which was just backported from the Itanium to the PA-RISC platforms.) ServiceGuard also has a new fast failover feature that can detect and move a failing application from one node in a cluster to another one six times faster than previously possible, taking about five seconds. Van der Zweep says that while ServiceGuard can support two-node failover clustering as well as clustering for horizontal performance, the two-node clustering support is what most customers need. HP is also announcing ServiceGuard Extensions for RAC, which aims to provide continuous availability for HP Integrity servers running Oracle 9i RAC or 10g databases and BEA Systems's WebLogic application server. This latter feature us available today.

Finally, HP will announce that it pay-per-use utility pricing for HP-UX 11i and related systems programs and hardware on the Integrity line of machines is now available on Integrity machines running Windows. (The way pay-per-use pricing works on the Integrity boxes is roughly like this: customers configure a box that is about 70 percent bigger than they need to handle their workloads and then activate 60 percent of it. The minimum pay-per-use fees are equivalent to 60 percent of the cost of leasing the bigger box, and activation of extra components is priced based on the cost of already activated features.) Instant Capacity on Demand capability, which allows processors to be activated as needed by workloads, will be enabled for Windows and Linux as soon as the enhanced vPar partitions are available on the Integrity machines.