HP's Virtual World: Making Workload Shifts Easier

Hewlett-Packard this week is rolling out enhancements to the HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity and HP9000 servers that include integrated software for planning, managing, and automating virtual servers. The enhancements will include a capacity adviser to provide tools that allow users to simulate placement of virtualized application workloads. A virtualization manager is supposed to reduce the complexity of managing physical and virtual severs and will support HP-UX and Linux, as well as Windows and OpenVMS on Integrity servers.

The Integrity Essentials software also features a new version of Global Workload Manager designed to let users dynamically allocate server resources on a real-time basis according to business priorities, an extension of the feature currently available for HP-UX and Linux to support OpenVMS.

Integrity Virtual Machines will provide users with a broad range of partitioning options, allowing multiple operating-system instances to share a single CPU and input/output resources. It will be available for HP-UX this year, Windows and Linux in 2006, and later for OpenVMS.

The virtualization enhancements will let users evolve their data centers from common "static" virtualization environments, where servers are divided into specific workloads, to "dynamic" virtualized environments, says Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing for HP. That would let resources flow from application to application and between servers automatically while meeting prescribed service levels.

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