HP Integrity Virtual Server Manager 6.0 User Guide

1 Introduction
This document helps you understand and use HP Integrity Virtual Server Manager.
The audience for this document includes system administrators and others responsible for maintaining
an Integrity VSP and its virtual partitions. You should be familiar with the HP Integrity Virtual
Partitions (Integrity VM) product and HP-UX system administration using either HP SMH or HP
Systems Insight Manager.
This chapter provides an overview of HP Integrity (Virtual Server Manager) and the product that it
manages, HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM). This chapter also lists the basic management
tasks you can perform using Virtual Server Manager.
HP Integrity VM
HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) is a soft partitioning and virtualization technology that
enables you to create multiple software-controlled Itanium-based virtual partitions within a single
HP Integrity server, Integrity blade, or nPartition. The Integrity server or nPartition acts as a VSP for
the virtual partitions (virtual partitions are also called guests). The VSP is a platform manager. It
manages hardware resources such as memory, CPU allocation, and I/O devices, and shares them
among multiple virtual partitions. The VSP runs a version of the HP-UX operating system and can
be managed using standard HP-UX management tools. HP Integrity VM 4.0 and later runs on
HP-UX v3 only. Version 3.5 runs on HP-UX v2 only.
The virtual partitions share a single set of physical hardware resources, yet each virtual partition
is a complete environment in itself and runs its own instance of an operating system (called a guest
OS). As with a real machine, the virtual partition contains:
• At least one processor core, also referred to as a CPU
• Memory
• Disks
• Networking cards
• A keyboard
• A console
• Other components of a computer
All these elements are virtual, meaning that they are at least partially emulated in software rather
than fully implemented in hardware; however, to the guest OS they appear as if they are real,
physical components.
No guest OS can access memory allocated to another guest OS. One virtual partition is not affected
by software events on another virtual partition, such as faults or planned software downtimes.
Integrity VM optimizes the utilization of hardware resources, quickly allocating resources such as
processor cores, memory, or I/O bandwidth to the virtual partitions as needed. Any software that
runs on supported versions of HP-UX can run in an Integrity VM virtual partition. No recompiling,
recertification, or changes are required for applications to run in a guest OS. Applications run in
the guest OS as they do on any operating system.
The operating systems supported on guests vary from version to version of HP Integrity Virtual
Partitions. For information about supported VM guest operating systems, see the version of the HP
Integrity Virtual Machines Installation, Configuration, and Administration manual that corresponds
to the version of HP Integrity virtual partitions being used.
HP Integrity Virtual Server Manager
HP Integrity Virtual Server Manager is the GUI that you can use from your browser to manage
Integrity VM resources. Virtual Server Manager allows you to create, configure, and manage virtual
HP Integrity VM 7