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

that host. Since this pattern repeats daily, the physical to virtual and virtual to physical moves

must be achieved quickly (minutes, rather than hours) and automatically.

A customer has two datacenters, each at a different site. The production workloads run on

physical servers at the primary site and are configured to be failed over to the recovery site,

in case of a disaster at the primary site. The recovery site is equipped with a set of servers

configured as virtual machine hosts. In this use case, planned or unplanned failovers require

physical to virtual and virtual to physical moves across sites.

The configuration of the recovery site as a set of virtual machine hosts may be driven by the

needs of test and development activities that are carried out at that site. Or, it may be driven

by a need to reduce the cost of disaster recovery by running the workloads on virtual

machines hosted by a relatively smaller set of servers. Recovery time objectives for this

customer require that the moves be achieved quickly and automatically, as in the previous

example.

The reader is assumed to be familiar with the Virtualization Manager and Insight Recovery

components of HP ID. Virtualization manager supports fluid cross-technology (between physical and

virtual or between dissimilar physical servers) movement of Logical Servers; Insight Recovery builds on

this capability to provide DR protected Logical Servers that can perform cross-technology movement

across sites.

Capabilities and Limitations

Using the tools and procedures described in this document, the user may

Configure and manage a Logical Server that can perform cross-technology movements within

the datacenter

Configure and manage a DR-protected Logical Server that can be failed over across

datacenters in a cross-technology movement.

The following limitations should be noted:

Configuration of a cross-technology Logical Server requires additional steps (however, no

additional steps are required at the time of the move, within or across sites)

Virtual machines must be configured to emulate either the LSI Logic Parallel or LSI Logic SAS

storage type if using Windows 2008 or LSI Logic Parallel storage type if using Windows

2003.

The VMware ESX guest tools will not be automatically installed.

There is no explicit support for NPIV.

Preparation of the portable system image so it can run on both physical and virtual servers

starts from the OS installed on a physical server (i.e., it is not supported to start with the OS

installed on a virtual machine and prepare it to run on a physical server)

In the case of a Logical Server configured to run on both physical and virtual servers, the

virtual machine is configured to use a RDM (Raw Device Mapped) Fibre Channel SAN

storage presented to the VM host for boot and data – the same as used by the Logical Server

when running on a physical server

In the case of a Logical Server configured to run on both physical and virtual servers, an

associated SCSI storage Logical Unit must be presented using the same LUN value to all