HP Integrity Virtual Machines Online Migration with IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.50

Executive summary

Most data centers have server hardware that is underutilized. These same data centers almost never

have enough servers to satisfy their customers. These seemingly contradictory situations have led

administrators to the obvious conclusion for years – ―I should be able to make better use of the

resources I already have.‖ There are several virtualization products available today, including HP

Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) that provides a uniquely pragmatic and effective

consolidation solution.

The value of Integrity VM is realized in reducing the total cost of ownership for a server environment.

This reduction in cost is attributable to practical consolidation, increased overall system utilization and

scalability, increased flexibility in configurations, faster server provisioning, higher quality and

productivity, and improved system availability with higher capacity.

Integrity Virtual Machines provides the ability to migrate a running virtual system from one Integrity

hardware system to another while maintaining the state of the applications, workloads, and operating

system running on that virtual system. This functionality is available without requiring a physical server

upgrade and is available on all HP Integrity servers.

Target audience: This white paper is intended for IT personnel responsible for evaluating HP Integrity

VM Online Migration with IBM software, and assumes general familiarity and working experience

with HP-UX, HP VSE (Virtual Server Environment, now called HP Insight Dynamics – VSE for Integrity

servers) components, as well as IBM Informix Dynamic Server.

This white paper describes testing performed in October 2009.

Integrity VM overview

HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) is a software virtualization technology within the HP

Virtual Server Environment (HP VSE) that enables you to create multiple virtual servers or machines

with shared resourcing within a single HP Integrity server or nPartition – each with its own ‗guest‘

operating system instance, applications and users.

Integrity VM provides software fault and security isolation, shared processor cores and I/O, automatic

dynamic resource allocation (based on demand and entitlement) and dynamic memory migration. HP

Integrity Virtual Machines runs on any HP-UX 11i nPar or HP Integrity server (including Integrity server

blades) and supports the following guests:

 HP-UX 11i v2 and v3

 Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 SP1, SP2; Windows Server 2008

 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform 4.4, 4.5

 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) SP1, SP2

The VM can run any application supported by the guest OS and behave as it normally would on a

single physical Integrity server without the need for recompilation or other changes. Integrity VM is

designed to provide binary application compatibility between native HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3

Integrity server applications and the same applications running within virtual machines as long as the

applications access devices that are virtualized by Integrity VM.

VMs require Integrity VM host software to manage the hardware resources such as CPU, memory and

I/O on the physical system being virtualized and shared between multiple VMs. The VM host software

runs on a standard HP-UX 11i v2 or 11i v3 operating system, which can be managed by a variety of

HP-UX and VSE tools such as HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), System Management Homepage

(SMH), and Global Workload Manager (gWLM).