HP Virtualisation Continuum for HP-UX

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Overview

HP Virtualisation Continuum for HP-UX

Increase server efficiency with consolidation tuned for: high availability, flexibility and performance. Utilise HP's broad set of virtualisation technologies that range from electrical and dynamic partitions to virtual machines and containers. These technologies create virtual environments with either separate OS instances or isolated workloads and can be combined together.

The HP-UX virtualisation technologies integrate with:

HP Matrix Operating Environment for HP-UX to: dynamically optimise infrastructure according to business policies, and automate capacity planning.
HP Utility Pricing Solutions to manage acquisition, deployment and billing costs of initial and add-on capacity
HP-UX Serviceguard Solutions to ensure mission-critical applications are always-on and disaster tolerant

HP nPartitions (nPars)

Reduce costs: with high performance consolidation
Protect: through electrical and security isolation, software isolation and compliance

HP-UX Virtual Partitions (vPars) & HP Integrity VM

Reduce costs and increase flexibility: through increased server utilisation
Increase flexibility: with dynamic migration of resources and workloads
Rapid deployment of new environments

HP-UX Containers

Reduce costs with: high performance consolidation within one shared OS instance (reducing ISV licencing)
Simplify management: with one shared operating system
Protect:
- Environment by improving security and compliance
- Protect investments by easily transitioning HP 9000 environments to Integrity servers via HP 9000 Containers

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Do you need to increase your server utilisation and flexibility to get the most out of your existing servers?

To reduce costs and optimise resources, deploy HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM v6, a converged virtualisation solution that consolidates multiple workloads onto a single HP Integrity server or hard partition (nPartition).

What’s New

Increase availability of virtualised workloads by reconfiguring vPars v6.2 memory dynamically and doubling the storage access paths per VM
Reduce costs by enabling v6 vPars and VMs to coexist on the same server (or nPartition)
Flex and share I/O with new Emulex Fibre Channel card support for virtualisation and N-Port ID Virtualisation (NPIV)

Features

Reduce costs, and improve availability, performance, scalability, and flexibility, with the consolidation and enhanced resource utilisation provided by virtualising servers.

Isolate workloads with unique operating systems, applications, resources and users, and provide high availability support with HP Serviceguard
Eliminate the need for planned downtime for server upgrades and maintenance since online VM mobility of VM workloads moves a workload to a completely different system without bringing the system or VM down
For maximum workload performance and scalability in a virtualised environment, utilize virtual partitions with dedicated processor core and memory, that can be dynamically migrated for flexibility
For maximum server utilisation and flexibility, share and dynamically optimise all available resources (cores, memory and I/O, by simultaneously executing multiple virtual servers with Integrity Virtual Machines (VM)
Meet varying demands with easy transformation of workloads between vPars and Integrity VMs
Optimise and flex resources with powerful and easy-to-use infrastructure management, provided by the HP Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure and HP Insight Software

Technical specifications

Product Name

Current version

Operating Systems

Servers Supported

Notes

HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM v6

B.06.20.00

HP-UX 11i v3

All Integrity/HP-UX servers

HP-UX vPars v5

A.05.08

HP-UX 11i v3, HP-UX 11i v2

Superdome 2

Firmware version: at least 2.51.xx

HP Integrity VM v4

B.04.30.00

HP-UX 11i v3

All Integrity/HP-UX servers

Product Information

Quick Specs

Technical White Papers

Consolidate multiple workloads within one HP-UX instance

HP-UX Containers

Reduce costs:
- High performance consolidation within one OS instance
- Lower ISV licencing
Simplify: Decrease OS images to manage
Protect: Improve security and compliance

What’s new

HP-UX Containers 3.1 simplifies container manageability:

Easily update HP-UX in a container environment
Replicate containers for faster set up of new containers

HP-UX Containers 3.0 increases isolation and control:

New system containers

Consolidate multiple private environments within an HP-UX instance
Gain control with per-container administrator domains

Force-to-wire capability:

Enhance compliance: send networking to wire for required external monitoring and auditing

Business benefits

Reduced cost:

Lower hardware requirements, software licences, management and support costs
Maximised server utilisation
Consolidation of enterprise server workloads
Greater efficiency with faster deployment of new workloads

Increased flexibility of resources
Increased security

Isolation of workload environments

Technology advantages

Shared O/S instance
Flexibility of 3 types of containers:

Workload containers: Application stacking with simplified management, and highly granular security properties
System containers: Consolidate with unique private environments, for easy application deployment with out-of-box implementation
HP 9000 Containers: Easily transition HP 9000 environments to HP Integrity servers

Integrated with industry-leading HP Serviceguard high availability clustering to manage container load balancing and failover

How it works

HP-UX Containers utilises a shared OS virtualisation model to allow a single instance of the HP-UX operating system to host multiple application workloads in individual operating environments, efficiently utilising shared server resources (CPU, memory and network access). Containers are portable and can be migrated or cloned across servers for high availability and load balancing purposes.

Each container can have: private file system view, network IP interfaces; inter-process communication (IPC) and process view, login environment, CPU and memory resource entitlements, startup and shutdown capabilities.

Host/domain name, systems services, file system namespace, and network/NFS configuration can be private to the container (for greater isolation), or can be shared with the system (for simplified management and administration).

At a Glance

Current version: HP-UX Containers: A.03.01; (see HP 9000 Containers for separate version)
Hardware platforms and Operating System: All Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v3
Resource allocation: Processor core (dedicated or share-based), memory (dedicated or share-based)
Software Licence: Included with HP-UX 11i v3 Base Operating Environment (via HP-UX Secure Resource Partitions and HP 9000 Containers)
Support: Included with HP-UX 11i v3 support

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High level

Webcast

White papers

More technical documentation

Partitions electrical isolation and performance

HP nPartitions (nPars) :

Reduce costs with high performance consolidation
Maximise high availability by restricting hardware failures to a segment of a server
Protect workloads through electrical, software, and security isolation and compliance

What’s new

Increase availability, scalability and manageability of the new Integrity server blades (BL870c i4 and BL890c i4) - with new hard partitions (nPartitions)

For electrical workload isolation with flexibility:

Increased availability with electrically isolated hard partitions
Enhanced scalability to scale nPars up and down in minutes
Simple management with easy to use graphical user interface

» nPartitions for HP Integrity BL870c i4 and BL890c i4 server blades Technical White Paper (PDF 2.0 MB)

Technology advantages

Electrical hardware isolation for: maximum isolation and and firmware upgrades
Online serviceability of one Superdome 2 nPartition (while others continue to run)
Native performance
High availability through Integration with HP Serviceguard Solutions
Ease of management with HP Matrix Operating Environment and other HP-UX system management tools

How it works

HP nPartitions (nPars) is hard partition technology, delivered as part of select HP Integrity servers, that enables you to configure a single server complex as one large server or as multiple smaller servers.

Each nPartition:

Has one or more cells (containing processors and memory) that are assigned to the partition for its exclusive use
Is assigned any I/O chassis that is attached to a cell belonging to that partition
Hosts its own: operating system instance, applications and users

At a Glance

Operating Systems: HP-UX 11i v3
Hardware platforms: Select HP Integrity servers (Superdome 2, Superdome, rx86x0, rx76x0); and Integrity server blades BL870c i4 and BL890c i4
Granularity: cell or blade
Compliance certification: Common Criteria CCOPP-OS protection profile

Learn more

White papers
nPartitions for BL870c i4 and BL890c i4 servers:

Superdome 2 nPartitions:

More technical documentation