Managing HP Integrity Servers with HP Server Automation and HP Virtual Server Environment

Introduction
HP offers the most complete solution for managing IT infrastructures at all levels, whether managing
end-to-end business services across clients, networks, servers, and storage, or continuously optimizing
the utilization of HP hardware resources. This paper highlights two HP offerings that work in
partnership to manage and optimize your infrastructure: HP Server Automation (SA) and HP Virtual
Server Environment (VSE). Together, they form a solution designed to complement each other and
help achieve desired business outcomes.
The first half of this paper describes the features of HP SA and HP VSE. HP SA is a foundation for
automating manual tasks associated with deployment and compliance of server and application
infrastructures for large scale enterprise environments. When these environments include HP Integrity
and HP 9000 servers, HP VSE can optimize the utilization of these servers and their workloads
through virtualization. In other words, SA ensures stable system and application configurations and
HP VSE lets you run more workloads on the same hardware. Both solutions are needed to meet the
needs of today’s rapidly changing business environment. The second half of this paper shows specific
examples of how these two products can be used together to increase efficiency in IT operations.
What are SA and VSE?
HP Server Automation
The primary role of HP Server Automation (SA) (formerly Opsware Server Automation System) is to
automate the tasks of provisioning and maintaining large pools of heterogeneous servers and
applications. It enables safe and consistent modifications by allowing you to model and validate
changes before committing them to a server. Knowledge gained through long hours of trial and error
can be encapsulated into policies that are launched with a single command. The SA compliance
dashboard and reports show which systems do not match the policies established for them, and allow
them to be quickly brought into compliance via remediation. Remediation is the process of changing
the system and application configurations to match the policies defined for that system.
SA supports a distributed architecture that enables global scalability. An agent installed on each
managed system communicates back to the SA cores (Central Management Servers) for all
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