The Unix Guardian--HP Updates HP-UX 11i v3, No Plans for X64 Port

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Volume 4, Number 36 -- October 4, 2007

HP Updates HP-UX 11i v3, No Plans for X64 Port

Published: October 4, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard launched its HP-UX 11i v3 variant of Unix for Itanium and PA-RISC processors in January and started shipping it in February. According to Brian Cox, director of software planning and marketing for the company's Business Critical Systems unit, HP wants to put out a new version of HP-UX every three years or so and do updates to each version every six months or so. Which means that it is time to roll up and update for HP-UX 11i v3.

The first update to HP-UX 11i Release 1 is called Update 1, which was code-named "Vitality" internally at HP. It will be followed by the Update 2 tweak, code-named "Vibrancy," about six months from now. This leaves open the possibility of an Update 3 code-named "Viagra," which would, of course, be focused on keeping systems up and humming. . . . (That's a joke. HP has not divulged what is coming out in that update, which should come to market about a year from now.)

The one thing that Update 1 does not have, and this is important for customers who have qualified their applications on the new operating system, is changes to the HP-UX kernel. Most of the changes are, as was the case back in June, with the Virtual Server Environment, or VSE, which is HP's homegrown virtualization hypervisor and related management tools. The virtual partitions (vPars) and hardware partitions (nPars) that HP created for HP-UX running on PA-RISC were over the past few years moved over to Itanium iron, and with the launch of HP-UX 11i v3, the company has been promising to support other operating systems within these virtualized environments. When HP-UX 11i v3 was delivered in February, only HP-UX could run inside VSE on the platforms running 11i v3, but with Update 1, now Windows Server 2003, Linux (from Red Hat and Novell), and OpenVMS, HP's proprietary operating system, are all supported inside VSE partitions.

With Update 1, HP is also making nPars configurable on the fly through a new feature called dynamic nPars. Virtual partitions were already dynamic, allowing CPU, memory, and I/O capacity to be allocated and reallocated to them on the fly as they are running. nPars have until now had fixed resources that required a reboot of the system to change. But with Update 1, nPars are now also malleable in terms of CPU, memory, and I/O allocated to them. nPars provide full electronic isolation, which is something security-conscious customers like, but they also want the flexibility of vPars, too. Dynamic nPars is the best of both worlds. It is not clear if dynamic nPars only support HP-UX 11i v3 Update 1 or if Windows, Linux, and OpenVMS can run inside these partitions as well. The update has a bunch of tweaks and tucks to make managing virtualized environments a bit easier, too.

Update 1 also includes support for the hot-swapping of processors and memory without having to reboot the system. I/O drivers for HP-UX can also be added, replaced, or deleted without taking servers down. HP's compiler tools have been tweaked to work with the new operating system and the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors to take advantage of the dual-core processors and the architecture wrapped around them. The maximum addressability of disk storage for HP-UX has been boosted to a mind-numbing 100 million zetabytes, and the operating system now automatically senses the addition of new storage arrays and can absorb them into the storage pool for allocation as the system is running. HP-UX 11i v3 Update 1 has also been certified to run on the Itanium-based BL860c Integrity blade server as well. HP-UX has also been woven into the blade management software in the BladeSystem chassis, so it can be managed in exactly the same way as Windows and Linux.

While I was meeting with Cox for breakfast in midtown Manhattan to shoot the breeze about HP-UX and life in general, I asked the obvious question that all of HP's competitors and probably plenty of its customers are wondering: Is HP ever going to port HP-UX from Itanium to X64 processors?

"That is not in the cards at this time," says Cox. "Adoption of Linux on the X64 platform is where the momentum is. Just look at Sun's own X64 server line. Even after giving Solaris away, most of Sun's sales for its X64 servers are for Linux-based systems." To be fair, Sun only recently became a Windows OEM, and is not yet selling "Galaxy" servers with Windows preconfigured on them. It is safe to bet that Sun will sell as many preconfigured Windows and Linux boxes as it does Solaris boxes.

The fact that HP has not decided to port HP-UX to X64 processors after watching Sun get close to 10 million downloads of Solaris 10 (with about two-third of them on X86 and X64 platforms) might be a bit surprising. I happen to think that HP likes to charge a premium for Itanium-based servers and HP-UX, which is a lot more solid than Linux right now. I sometimes wonder if HP and Intel have a blood-brother pact that was based on the idea that so long as Intel makes Itanium chips, HP will not port HP-UX to X64 processors. As each successive generation of X64 chips gets more mainframe-class reliability, bandwidth, and scalability, the differentiation between Itanium and X64 is diminishing, and I think that the pressure for HP to do a port will increase. This is particularly true as Intel shifts to the QuickPath Interconnect with the future "Nehalem" processors in 2008 and presumably makes good on its promises to put Itanium and Xeon chips in the same socket. At that point, HP may not be able to charge such a premium for Itanium-based iron and customers may be clamoring for a single ProLiant platform that runs everything. Time will tell.

What will probably move over from the Integrity family to the ProLiant family, however, is the VSE virtualization hypervisor, according Cox. This may seem odd, given HP's staunch support of VMware's ESX Server and XenSource's Xen hypervisors. But for many customers, having an integrated virtualization environment with the same set of tools that spans Integrity and ProLiant platforms might be more important than which hypervisor is buried underneath it all.