HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

More details regarding OS installation (including VMware ESX installation) are available in Chapter 3 of the HP

Insight Control server deployment User Guide, available at

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02048553/c02048553.pdf .

The key point is to ensure the OS is deployed to the intended boot volume (and not mistakenly to a data volume).

Another technique to ensure this appropriate deployment is to initially have only the boot volume associated with the

logical server, and add the data volume(s) after the OS had been installed. This is further facilitated by use of multi-

initiator NPIV, since it allows each volume to have unique initiator WWNs (visible in the storage pool entries), and

those multiple WWNs can be applied to the physical HBA ports by the Matrix OE software (through Virtual Connect).

Environments which do not support multi-initiator NPIV have as many initiators as there are physical HBA ports, and

thus may more constrained. As shown earlier in Figure 16, there may be one storage pool entry with two paths to

volumes within the storage pool entry (using two initiator WWNs), or there may be single paths to volumes in

separate storage pool entries (using two initiator WWNs), or an additional mezzanine card can be used to provide

four physical ports.

Support for servers not using Virtual Connect

Matrix OE also contains support for servers (blades or standard servers) not using Virtual Connect. The easiest

scenario is when those servers are hypervisors, and they themselves are not managed as logical servers, but the

logical servers can be instantiated into their virtual machines. When the servers not using Virtual Connect are

intended to be used for logical servers instantiated onto physical servers, there are some additional steps necessary to

support such servers, and some restrictions. It is necessary to manually define the portability groups to contain the

suitable set of servers to match the environment and needs.

Without Virtual Connect, the HBA initiator WWNs cannot be migrated from one blade to another, so the storage will

be presented to the physical WWNs of the servers within the portability group. This does reduce the flexible

movement, as the boot and data volumes are presented to the physical server WWNs (versus the Virtual Connect

WWNs), and thus once the logical server has been activated on a physical server not using Virtual Connect, it cannot

be migrated to another physical server. It can be deactivated if desired, and later activated back to the same physical

server. That physical server cannot be used by another logical server.

Power on and off operations are obviously not done through Virtual Connect, but rather are handled through OO

workflows. Matrix OE bundles OO workflows which perform power operations via iLO2 for the ProLiant and Integrity

HP servers. More details are available in the Server workflows for HP Matrix Operating Environment white paper

available at http://www.hp.com/go/matrixoe/docs .

Summary

HP Matrix OE is the infrastructure management at the core of the HP CloudSystem Matrix, a converged

infrastructure solution spanning servers, storage and network resources that is an ideal platform for delivering shared

services. The HP Matrix OE solution introduced support for logical servers. Matrix OE has been building on that

support since, including improvements to facilitate server/storage administrator interaction for logical server storage

provisioning. HP logical server technology further enables system administrators to build a converged infrastructure,

delivering a new level of automation, simplicity, interoperability, and integration to meet business demands. Logical

servers are a new class of abstracted servers that allows system administrators to manage physical machines and

virtual machines using the same management construct. With cross-technology logical servers, it is even possible to

migrate a logical server from a physical blade to a virtual machine, and back again (facilitating flexible maintenance

and cost-effective recovery scenarios).