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

section Configuring and Managing DR Protected Cross-technology Logical Servers - Setting

failover target type preference below for more information.

Configuring Logical Servers for movement between dissimilar physical

servers

HP ID 6.2 provides the ability to fine tune the list of targets that are considered „most suitable‟ for a

given Logical Server. This allows the user to manage the list of „most suitable‟ targets to correspond

to the target types that are able to successfully activate the Logical Server. Refer to the section

Configuring and Managing Cross-technology Logical Servers - Target Attributes below for more

information.

HP Insight Recovery activates protected Logical Servers exclusively on „most suitable‟ targets on

failover. Hence the ability to modify target attributes is useful to ensure a successful failover. The

target attributes are included in the data transferred by the Insight Recovery export/import sequence;

hence an expansion in the „most suitable‟ list at the exporting site will be reflected at the importing

site.

Configuring and Managing Portable OS Images

Mobility of server workloads is hampered by the fact that most operating systems are configured, at

install time, for the specific platform onto which they are installed. Examples include:

Only the device drivers necessary for the target platform are installed and configured;

attempting to boot the same OS instance on a different server may result in device errors or

system failures.

Configuration settings, such as IP addresses or storage identifiers, may be bound to specific

devices whose “names” may change. For example, the “red” subnet may be attached to the

first NIC port on one server, while it‟s attached to the third NIC on another.

HP ID 6.2 supports mechanisms to prepare a server image so that it will continue to work when

moved to a different physical or virtual server, covering three areas that HP determined to be key to

achieving this objective: driver installation, HBA configuration and NIC configuration. The tools

developed for this purpose are

PISA (Portable Images Storage Assistant)

PINT (Portable Images Network Tool)

PISA

When Windows is installed on a SAN LUN attached to a server, it installs a driver which is specific to

the HBA controller on that server. If that LUN is subsequently reassigned to a virtual machine on a

server running VMware ESX, ESX presents only SCSI direct-attached devices to the virtual machine.

Windows is still configured to use the original server‟s HBA controller and therefore is unable to start

up. PISA enables the appropriate Windows drivers allowing Windows to start in the virtual machine.

PISA assumes that the virtual machine is configured to use the Raw Device Mapping feature in ESX to

configure a LUN on a SAN as a disk drive available to the virtual machine. The virtual machine must