This article is more than 1 year old

HP gooses virtualization for servers

Adds orchestration and disaster recovery

Each machine is given a all the specifications for the software and settings on each tier, and administrators can save multiple configurations - such as small, medium, and large configs for each tier to address different-sized workloads - in a template. These templates are then placed into a self-service portal that allows software engineers, software testers, and system administrators to deploy the server, storage, and network resources they need to do their work or to move workloads into production. The workflow engine embedded in the feature can link into existing change management systems and is capable of allocating resources for anywhere from an hour to indefinitely.

Insight Orchestration is akin to VMware's Lab Manager orchestration tool for its virtual machine environments, but according to Linesch there are two big differences. HP's Insight Orchestrator feature works on physical as well as virtual servers - meaning you can describe and deploy software stacks on a single piece of iron that is not virtual, which VMware Lab Manager cannot do - and it is intended for development as well as production deployments.'

The Insight Orchestration feature costs $795 per server and is currently available for ProLiant or BladeSystem servers using x64 processors running Windows or Linux. Later this year, support for Integrity machines will be added, and it is likely that HP-UX, Windows, and Linux will all be supported as physical or virtual environments. But HP made no promises.

Another new feature announced today for the Insight Dynamics-VSE toolset is called Insight Recovery, and this is an alternative means of disaster recovery for ProLiant and Integrity machines to clustering technologies such as HP's own MC ServiceGuard high availability software that is bundled with some versions of its HP-UX operating system.

Insight Recovery takes advantage of the Continuous Access data replication software built into HP's midrange StorageWorks EVA disk arrays and allows a physical or virtual machine running on one server to be recovered and started on another server at a remote recovery site. Obviously, you need EVA arrays in both sites, and they have to be linked for data replication.

Itanic future

The Insight Recovery feature is available on BladeSystem machines in physical mode (using VirtualConnect) or using VMware hypervisors on ProLiant rack and blade servers in virtual mode; support for other hypervisors as well as for Itanium-based machines is coming later this year. Pricing was not announced for this feature.

In a minor tweak to the Insight Dynamics stack that does relate to Integrity blade servers, HP now says that it can do live migration of VM guests between Itanium-based blades equipped with the Insight Dynamics-VSE virtualization environment using the VirtualConnect I/O virtualization electronics in the c3000 and c7000 BladeSystem chasses.

The Insight Dynamics tool has also been updated to gather capacity planning information from Windows-based servers built by IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others in an effort to allow system administrators to do what-if scenarios concerning moving workloads off those boxes and onto physical or virtualized ProLiant and Integrity servers. This capacity planning update is not available for non-HP iron running Linux or other operating systems, but it could in the future. ®

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