What’s new with the HP Virtual Server Environment?

January 15, 2009

Version 4.1 of the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for Integrity is now available. With this release, the flexibility of virtualization is extended to physical servers through HP’s logical server capabilities. Logical servers, which can be easily created and freely moved, enable the movement of server profiles from one physical server to another. This simplifies infrastructure change, and allows infrastructures to be repurposed with ease to respond to changing business needs. Also included in VSE 4.1 is expanded scalability for HP VSE management components, HP Capacity Advisor and HP Virtualization Manager. In addition, HP also announced Online Virtual Machine (VM) Migration for Integrity Virtual Machines. This enables a running VM, its operating system, and its applications to be moved to a different VM Host system without service interruption.

May 12, 2008

The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) version 4.0 is now available. VSE, which provides an automated virtual infrastructure that can adapt in seconds with mission critical reliability, now includes energy-aware enhancements to HP Capacity Advisor to help customers substantially reduce energy consumption and dramatically improve utilization rates. In addition, VSE 4.0 contains enhancements to HP Global Workload Manager for “predictive control” and manageability enhancements to allow customers to manage both their Integrity and ProLiant servers from the same management console.
 
HP VSE 4.0, delivered as an update to the Virtual Server Environment Suite, includes the following new capabilities for VSE on Integrity:

HP Capacity Advisor is now the industry’s most advanced real-time capacity planning tool.

• Using “Smart Solver” technology from HP Labs, this tool analyzes server capacity and power usage based on thousands of historical data points. It eliminates months of capacity planning and guesswork, enabling administrators to confidently predict infrastructure requirements.
• With the new Consolidation Pack customers can jumpstart daunting server consolidation projects. The Consolidation Pack provides a cost-effective, limited-time-use license of the full-featured capacity planning capability of HP Capacity Advisor.
  More information on HP Capacity Advisor

HP Global Workload Manager (gWLM)

• Delivers higher service levels with new “predictive controls” that recognize demand patterns and proactively allocate resources prior to their actual need.  
• Intelligent policy engine that automatically allocates resources among multiple workloads to increase server utilization while meeting service levels for high-priority applications.
• Supports Time-Based Policies, allowing for “time of day/week/month” based policy management.
• Supports “shares per metric” and multiple public/private LAN environments.
• Windows CMS support via Systems Insight Manager (SIM). More information on HP Global Workload Manager 

ProLiant-based Windows CMS for Integrity

• Customers can now manage their Integrity and ProLiant servers using the same management console, resulting in greater admin efficiency and productivity and still be able to use advanced Integrity capabilities of VSE.
• All aspects of server management for both Integrity and ProLiant can be managed from a Windows CMS including gWLM on Integrity nodes, Ignite-UX, and all of the other HP-UX based tools.

VSE Reference Architectures (VSERA)

• VSE customers can build powerful infrastructure solutions to achieve a greater return on their IT investment. VSERAs are designed to help simplify the design and speed the time to deployment of solutions involving key applications. White papers available include:

• New SAP Adaptive Infrastructure multi-tiered application services environment with failover and consolidation, utilizing both VSE on Integrity servers and Insight Dynamics – VSE on ProLiant blades (available Q308).
• Visit the newly designed Reference Architecture website at www.hp.com/go/vsera

March 17, 2008

HP previewed the capabilities of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE, the next-generation of management software to enable customers to continuously analyze and optimize their Adaptive Infrastructures.

Insight Dynamics – VSE is the world’s first integrated solution to visualize, plan and change physical and virtual resources in exactly the same way.  It builds on HP Systems Insight Manager, Insight Control and the HP Virtual Server Environment, the best of HP’s industry-leading infrastructure management portfolio.  This provides a single toolkit to accelerate complex IT projects and simplify daily operations.

Insight Dynamics - VSE delivers 3 key capabilities for HP platforms:

• The Logical Server brings the freedom and flexibility of virtualization to physical servers through server profiles that can be easily created and freely moved.  This simplifies infrastructure change, and allows infrastructures to be repurposed with ease in order to quickly respond to changing business needs. 
• The industry’s most advanced real-time capacity planning tool, using Smart Solver technology from HP Labs, enables enterprises to continuously analyze and optimize server capacity and power use.  It collects and analyzes millions of historical data points from virtual and physical resources and will indicate the best fit for workloads for large scale consolidations. With the five-star rating system of Insight Dynamics – VSE, it will be shown in real time if a logical server can be moved. And with energy usage awareness built in, based on more than a thousand data points per server per day, decisions can be made on the fly to make data centers more energy-efficient than ever before.
• Control physical and virtual resources in exactly the same way from the familiar interface of HP Systems Insight Manager, the infrastructure management platform used by more companies than any other.  By having a single screen view to manage all available virtual and physical resources, including hypervisors from multiple vendors, IT staff can manage across the infrastructure rather than in silos, leading to greater productivity. 

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables continuous consolidation, where environments can be optimized on an ongoing basis for greater efficiency, rather than through infrequent, resource-intensive projects.  It provides the tools to create a more dynamictest and development infrastructure and reduce the number of underutilized and idle resources. It makes possible everyday HA- bringing cost effective and easy to implement high availability to many more applications than previously possible. With HP Insight Dynamics - VSE, the life of data centers can be extended by quickly identifying and consolidating inefficient servers onto fewer, more power-efficient ones.  This energy-aware capacity planning helps to substantially reduce energy consumption and dramatically improve utilization rates.

HP Insight Dynamics - VSE is scheduled to be available for HP BladeSystem, ProLiant and Integrity servers in the second calendar quarter of 2008.   For HP Integrity servers, this will be delivered as an update to the Virtual Server Environment Suite.

>> Online Press Kit (link to http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2008/datacenter-transformation/)

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