Dynamic workload movement with BladeSystem Matrix: Fluid movement between physical and virtual resources for flexibility and cost-effective recovery

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Introduction
HP Insight Dynamics (HP ID) is the infrastructure management at the core of the HP BladeSystem
Matrix, a converged infrastructure solution spanning servers, storage and network resources that is an
ideal platform for delivering shared services.
HP ID 6.2 introduces new capabilities
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to facilitate the fluid movement of workloads between
dissimilar servers within a site and across sites. Workloads may be moved between physical servers
and virtual machines and between dissimilar physical servers.
A major trend today in IT data center management is the push towards greater efficiency in the use of
compute, network and storage resources in the datacenter by treating them as a shared pool from
which the resource requirements of various applications, departments and organizations are met.
Central to this concept of converged infrastructure is the ability to rapidly and automatically create,
move and remove workloads on demand.
In a typical converged infrastructure implementation, a customer may use HP BladeSystem to run the
workloads and HP ID running on a central management server (CMS) to create, move and remove the
workloads as needed. The workload (in this paper, the workload is defined to include the operating
system (OS) on which the user application runs) may run directly on a blade. Or, it could run in a
virtual machine managed by a hypervisor, e.g., VMware ESX, running on the blade. Further, the
blades may have different hardware configurations or contain different versions of
hardware/firmware.
The new capabilities of HP ID discussed in this paper allow fluid movement of workloads in this type
of heterogeneous environment. These capabilities include (a) tools that allow the workload OS to be
prepared as a portable system image that can run in different server environments, and (b) fine-
grained user control over the set of specific physical servers and virtual machine hosts that HP ID may
run the workload on.
The fluid, two-way movement of workloads across dissimilar servers described in this paper is
different from the movement enabled by traditional migration tools. Those tools are oriented towards
enabling a one-way, permanent or semi-permanent migration between physical and virtual or
between dissimilar physical servers. The movement typically requires manual intervention and a
relatively longer period of time to complete.
The importance of the ability to fluidly move a workload from a physical server to a virtual machine
and back can be understood from the following examples:
A customer wishes to move their online workload running on a physical server during daily
off-peak hours to a virtual machine host, to free up the physical server to run a batch
workload. When the off-peak period is over, the batch workload is retired and the online
workload is moved back to its original execution environment.
During the time the online workload is „parked‟ on a virtual machine host, it has minimal
resource requirements, hence has minimal impact on other workloads that may be running on
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The „technology preview‟ level of support provided for these capabilities in HP Insight Dynamics 6.1 is upgraded to full support in 6.2