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

Table 1: Key Features of SA and VSE for HP-UX 11i Management
SA VSE
Configuring Virtual Partitions

HA Clustering Configuration

OS Installation
2

Platform Setup
Application Installation

Event and Health Monitoring

Patch and Update

Platform Maintenance
Remote Script Launch
 
Inventory (HW and SW)
3
 
Auditing

Inventory, Auditing and
Compliance
Compliance

Capacity Planning

Utility Pricing

Computing Resource
Optimization
Automated Workload Management

Managing with SA and VSE – Examples
The following examples illustrate how SA and VSE work together to improve infrastructure operations.
In the first example, a typical problem in day-to-day operations is described, and then is solved with
the event monitoring, compliance reporting and automated workload management features of SA and
VSE. The second example shows how VSE and SA work together to get a new system set up and
ready for production. In both examples, the SA core and VSE Central Management Server (CMS)
have already been installed and configured, and the systems to be managed have been discovered
and provisioned with the appropriate SA and VSE agents.
Example 1: Day-to-Day Operations
SA and VSE can be used together to ensure the smooth and efficient operation of a data center on an
ongoing basis. In this example, a system administrator uses SA and VSE together to troubleshoot and
remedy a performance problem on an Oracle® database server.
Synopsis: In this company, the database servers reside on physical partitions (nPartitions) whose
resource allocations (number of CPUs) are being managed by gWLM, VSE’s automated workload
management tool. One day, the system administrator receives a series of email notifications from HP
SIM showing that CPU run queue lengths on one system (va00np00) are exceeding the normal
threshold. The gWLM historical graph shows that the CPU allocation policy is operating as defined
but that the workload is requiring more CPU than expected. Suspecting that something might have
changed on the system, the system administrator consults the SA Compliance Dashboard and notices
that this server is out of compliance with one of the application configuration policies. The
administrator quickly brings the server back into compliance via remediation. After correcting the
configuration issue, the administrator confirms that the system's performance has returned to the
expected range.
2
SA installation of HP-UX 11i leverages Ignite-UX
3
Both VSE and SA provide similar inventory functionality. Unique capabilities of VSE include additional hardware detail. SA allows you to see
file system structure.
6