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

management operations. SA 6.5 can manage servers running Windows®, Linux, VMware, and

various UNIX® operating systems, including HP-UX 11i. HP VSE for Integrity servers supports HP-UX

11i, Windows, and Linux. This paper focuses on the management of servers running HP-UX 11i.

The main features of SA 6.5 managing an HP-UX 11i environment are automatic discovery and

inventory, provisioning, and auditing and remediation.

Automatic Discovery and Inventory

Given an IP address range, SA can automatically discover HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers and

identify their HP-UX 11i operating systems. After the administrator deploys the SA agent to the system

to be managed, SA performs a hardware and software inventory. Inventory information is refreshed

by the agent to the SA core on a daily basis. Inventory information can be explored via search and

reporting.

Provisioning

Without automation, application and patch installation can consume countless hours of administrative

activity. The SA provisioning capability supports operating system and application provisioning. SA

can provision Windows and Linux, and integrates with HP Ignite-UX to provision HP-UX 11i. SA also

enables the creation of software policies to encapsulate all of the information necessary to install and

configure an application. By associating one or more software policies with a server, and then by

launching remediation, the applications are quickly deployed in a consistent manner.

The complexity of patch (or update) management can exceed that of the basic operating system and

application installation. By their nature, patches are applied more frequently and can require

additional data and sophistication to handle dependencies. Software policies can be written for HP-

UX 11i patches in the same way as applications, making it easy to deploy patches consistently.

Auditing and Remediation

SA leverages user-defined best practices and provides out-of-the-box policies to proactively manage

configuration settings and to correct or prevent drift. The entire IT server infrastructure can be audited

in order to validate compliance against audit policies and immediately remediate any areas that are

out of compliance. Policies can be written to cover software installation, application configuration

and system configuration. In addition, out-of-the-box reports show whether systems comply with

regulatory standards. Customers can use the HP Live Network Subscription Service to acquire the

most current security and regulatory compliance policies, which can then be applied to systems as

appropriate. The compliance policies from HP Live Network are drawn from standards such as CIS,

SOX, PCI, HIPAA, and FISMA. New security vulnerability policies are generated daily from the

National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Because they are already configured as SA policies, it is

easy to add them to systems for quick auditing and remediation.

VSE and Server Resource Optimization

HP VSE provides an automated infrastructure that can adapt in seconds with mission-critical reliability.

HP VSE optimizes server utilization in real time by creating virtual servers that can automatically grow

and shrink based on business priorities and service-level objectives. Through tight integration with

partitioning, high availability and utility pricing, HP VSE maintains service levels in the event of

downtime and allows customers to pay for spare capacity on an as-needed basis.

The capabilities of VSE can be grouped into four major categories: intelligent control, partitioning,

availability, and utility pricing. All of these categories are focused on optimizing the usage of the

server hardware resources.