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HP Insight Dynamics – VSE software
Executive summary
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is the world’s first integrated
solution that lets you continuously analyze and optimize
your physical and virtual resources in exactly the
same way. It combines the best of the industry-leading
HP infrastructure management portfolio—including
HP Systems Insight Manager, HP Insight Control and
HP Virtual Server Environment—into one integrated
offering for HP BladeSystem, ProLiant and Integrity
servers. The result is a single toolkit that helps you
accelerate complex technology projects and simplify
daily operations. Insight Dynamics – VSE enables a
change-ready infrastructure, with all the freedom and
flexibility of virtualization delivered across your
physical infrastructure.
New management
challenges
To deliver better business outcomes, today’s data centers
need to make better use of their resources. Many suffer
from a proliferation of under-utilized servers that take up
valuable floor space, drive up power and cooling
costs, and put a strain on management resources.
Server virtualization helps data centers use resources
more efficiently. Virtualization is more than proven
to lower costs and increase flexibility. But virtual
environments bring their own set of management
challenges. So even with virtualized solutions in place,
data centers around the world continue to wrestle with
cost, time, quality and energy issues. These issues are
the heart of the need for HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
software.
Lower cost
Controlling virtual server sprawl
High on this list of virtualization challenges is the need to
combat “virtual sprawl”—which comes on top of the preexisting
problem of physical server sprawl. With the ease
of deploying virtual machines (VMs), many companies
have found themselves with a proliferation of virtual
servers, which creates a whole new set of management
challenges. Ideally, virtual servers should be provisioned
and governed under the same policies you use for your
physical servers. That’s one of the keys to simplifying
management of a virtualized technology environment.
Improving capacity planning
When it comes time for evaluating data center
capacity requirements, many data center managers
find themselves living with spreadsheets and best
guesses about their dynamic environments. This leads
to costly over-provisioning of resources—just to be
sure that systems can meet the peak needs of some
applications. So capacity waste becomes a part of
day-to-day business.
To solve this problem, you need better knowledge of
your environment, including detailed information on
system usage and workloads. That is one of the keys
to allocating virtual and physical resources in a more
flexible manner—and to avoiding over-provisioning.
But to make this shift to a more flexible world, you
first need better tools for capacity planning and
resource optimization.
2
Accelerate speed of change
Unifying management of virtual and physical resources
Virtualized environments can easily become silos that
require their own tools, skills sets and processes. This
is often the case. Many virtualized data centers have
one team to manage virtual machines and another to
manage physical servers. Each team has its own
processes and many organizations employ more than
one type of virtualization technology.
That kind of duplication is costly. It drains staff
productivity, drives up training costs and forces your
company to buy, use and manage different sets of
management software. In a better world, physical
servers and virtual machines would be managed
together—in the same way, by the same people, using
the same tools, under the same processes.
Simplifying consolidation
When it comes to server consolidation, data centers
are caught in a paradox: They find themselves using
a complex, time-consuming process in an attempt to
reduce complexity and lower cost. In a recent study by
Forrester, nearly 75 percent of respondents reported
that their consolidation projects took more than a
year, and in some cases several years, to complete.1
Extensive planning, manual work and involvement
of many different parts of the organization make
consolidation a laborious task.
To achieve a greater range of benefits from
consolidation, your organization needs tools that allow
you to transform project-based consolidation into a
routine initiative to rebalance and tune the infrastructure
to generate ongoing incremental benefits. In particular,
you need tools that provide real-time information on
server workloads, available capacity and opportunities
to shift workloads among physical servers and virtual
machines.
Deliver higher quality of service
Extending high availability to more applications
High availability usually means resource-intensive
clustering solutions, which aren’t appropriate for all
applications. Yet the success of your organization
probably depends on the availability of many
applications, both large and small. To keep your
business operating at its peak and enhance the
quality of services you deliver, you need ways to
extend high availability features, along with fast
recovery capabilities, to the full breadth of your
applications.
Extending the benefits of virtualization to your
entire infrastructure
For most organizations, the suggestion to “virtualize
everything” is not a viable option. Many workloads
are not suitable for deployment in virtual machines.
According to a leading analyst firm, by the end of
the decade, only half of all server workloads will
be virtualized.
Applications that run on physical servers can be timeconsuming
and resource-intensive to deploy, manage
and recover. When you need to make changes in the
physical servers, chances are you are going to have
to involve multiple organizations. That invariably takes
time and drives up costs. What’s needed is a way to
extend the freedom and efficiency of virtualization to
physical servers, as well as virtual machines.
Increase energy efficiency
Consolidating power-hungry servers
In data centers around the world, energy costs are
rising rapidly and consuming an ever-greater portion
of technology budgets. Data center electricity use has
more than doubled since 2000, according to a recent
study. The same study found that the total electric bill
for operating data center servers and associated
infrastructure was about $2.7 billion in the United
States and $7.2 billion in the world. And all the while,
the cost of energy has been spiraling upward.
To control rising energy expenditures, data center
managers need to find ways to consolidate powerhungry
servers and factor energy consumption into
capacity planning decisions. Here again, this takes
better information, including tools that allow you to
make energy usage a key part of your capacity
planning decisions.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE was designed specifically to
address these challenges that come with the optimization
of a virtual and physical environment.
1 Forrester Research, Inc.: “How Large Enterprises Approach IT Infrastructure
Consolidation” December 2007
2 “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers In the U.S. and the World,”
Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and Consulting Professor, Stanford University, February 15, 2007.
http://enterprise.amd.com/Downloads/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
3
Overcoming the
challenges with HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is a new class of
management software that allows you to continuously
analyze and optimize your Adaptive Infrastructure. It’s
the world’s first integrated solution that lets you visualize,
plan and change physical and virtual resources in
exactly the same way.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps your enterprise:
• Reduce costs—HP estimates the software will cut the
cost of common data center tasks by as much as 40
percent, reducing costs associated with capacity
planning, provisioning, upgrades and changes, and
energy. Your enterprise can realize the cost benefits of
virtualization faster by cutting analysis time for capacity
planning and consolidation from months to days.
Complex Excel spreadsheets or expensive services
engagements are replaced by instantly available data.
• Increase speed of change—By collapsing steps and
saving administrative time with key tasks, enterprises
can accelerate key technology projects. For example,
moving a workload from one server to another with
a simple drag-and-drop function takes minutes,
while conventional approaches take weeks and
often require extensive coordination among server,
storage and networking groups.
• Improve quality—Insight Dynamics – VSE software
enables everyday high availability previously
unavailable to many applications due to complex
and potentially expensive clustering requirements.
By easily redeploying logical servers in the event of
hardware failure, you can enjoy fast and affordable
protection.
•Manage energy—Consolidation and virtualization
are great ways to save energy. But your actual
power savings may depend on the choices you
make. Insight Dynamics – VSE makes comparing
energy consumption of different data center
configurations easy.
In essence, Insight Dynamics – VSE enables your
organization to get ahead of the curve by giving you
the information you need to proactively deal with
potential issues (such as performance, power and
space constraints) before they become problems that
impact your business. You no longer have to wait for
a server to be overloaded or to experience an outage
requiring a recovery. And if failures do occur, the
logical server capability of Insight Dynamics – VSE, and
the fast provisioning it enables, makes recovery fast and
easy to execute. You can now use Insight Dynamics –
VSE to ward off problems by balancing resources
across your data center to enable higher levels of
availability and quality of service.
4
Bringing the flexibility of virtualization to physical servers
A logical server profile is easily created and freely moved across physical and virtual machines.
Logical servers can be physical blade servers, virtual machines or offline templates.
Virtual fabric Virtual fabric
Logical server
Server
Image Configuration
requirements
Unique
IDs
Logical server
Server Server Server
Image Configuration
requirements
Unique
IDs
Key product
capabilities
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE includes three key capabilities
that drive value across your data center. These are logical
servers, real-time capacity planning, and unified control
of physical and virtual infrastructure.
The logical server
Logical servers bring the freedom and flexibility of
virtualization to physical servers. The logical server is
a server profile that is easily created and freely moved
across physical and virtual machines. By detaching
the logical identity from the physical resource, you
can create or move logical servers on any suitable
virtual or physical machine—on demand.
So what makes up a logical server? A logical server
profile describes the system image resources, whether
these are virtual, physical, shared or unshared. For
example, a logical server profile would include
entitlements such as power allocation, processor and
memory requirements, network connections, and
storage—everything that the OS and application
stack require to operate.
With a logical server approach, you can even create
templates for your frequently used applications with
specific configurations. These templates can be stored
and reactivated in minutes, when needed. The capability
to move server profiles across physical servers is
available first on HP BladeSystems with ProLiant server
blades and shortly thereafter with HP Integrity server
blades.
Real-time capacity planning
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is also the industry’s most
advanced real-time capacity planning tool. It allows you
to continuously analyze server capacity and power use.
It collects and analyzes millions of historical data points
from virtual and physical resources. Then, using new
Smart Solver technology developed by HP Labs, it can
show you the best fit for your workloads, reducing the
number of physical servers you need.
With the five-star rating system of Insight Dynamics –
VSE, you’ll see in real time if a logical server can be
moved. If so, you can actually drag and drop the logical
server to place it in the new location. Like having a team
of Ph.D.s behind you, Insight Dynamics – VSE takes
the tedious research and guesswork out of traditional
capacity planning. And with energy usage awareness
built in, based on more than a thousand data points
per server per day, you can make decisions on the fly
to make your data center more energy-efficient than
ever before.
Unified control
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE allows you to control physical
and virtual resources in exactly the same way. It extends
the capabilities of HP Systems Insight Manager—the
infrastructure management platform used by more
companies than any other—to allow you to see all
available resources on a single screen. And Insight
Dynamics – VSE is designed to manage leading
virtualization technologies from VMware, Citrix and
Microsoft®.
You can drill down as far as you need to without logging
into another tool. And because it’s one integrated
design, you can use Insight Dynamics – VSE to simplify
and standardize your organizational processes, without
actually changing them.
Lifecycle services
HP offers services to assist with virtualization in
each phase of the technology lifecycle. HP services
professionals will help with installation and ongoing
support of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE, while evolving
your virtualization initiative to a strategic enabler of
the business.
Lifecycle services include:
• Strategy—Understand the potential of HP Insight
Dynamics – VSE and assess its impact, along with the
impact of your existing virtualization solutions, on your
current environments.
•Design and integration of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
into your technology management and automation
framework across the data center.
• Installation and implementation HP Insight Dynamics –
VSE into your existing environment.
• Transition—Migration of legacy environments into the
new virtualization architecture that includes HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE.
• Support for your HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
solution 24x7.
•Continually improve on service levels to the business.
Delivery options
Starting in Q2 2008, you will be able to purchase
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE in one of two ways. For
HP ProLiant servers, the software will be delivered
through a new HP Insight Dynamics – VSE package,
building on the Insight Control Environment. For HP
Integrity servers, the functionality will be delivered as an
update to the proven Virtual Server Environment Suite,
extending that already strong offering with new
advanced capabilities.
5
New ways to tackle
the toughest technology
projects
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE creates new possibilities for
addressing your toughest technology challenges and top
business priorities in previously unimaginable ways.
Here are a few of the ways to put the software to
work to drive better business outcomes:
Continuous consolidation
Transform long-term projects into ongoing efforts.
Today, server consolidation is typically conducted one
project at a time, often over one to five years. Once
completed, the process begins again. HP Insight
Dynamics – VSE changes the ground rules of the
consolidation game. It accelerates your large-scale
consolidation projects and then lets you optimize
your resource on a more continuous basis.
First, Insight Dynamics – VSE lets you quickly evaluate
different scenarios for consolidating older and underutilized
physical servers onto virtual machines. Using
thousands of historical data points for each server, you
can simulate different workload configurations on
different sets of server resources. You can automatically
find best-fit solutions for dozens of servers, or even more.
And you can easily see which alternatives use the least
computing power, the least space, even the least energy.
Then HP Insight Dynamics – VSE gives you the
information you need to quickly rebalance and
repurpose infrastructure based on changing technology
and business priorities. When you need to deploy
a new workload, the five-star rating system lets you
instantly see the best place to put it in your existing
infrastructure. Using logical servers, you can then
drag and drop the workload onto a suitable virtual
or physical server that has free capacity.
You can quickly recognize opportunities to rebalance
workloads—identifying servers that often push their
capacity limits, and then shift the loads to servers that
are often under-utilized. You can see how repurposing
infrastructure could make you more efficient. A server
that runs certain workloads at night, such as a backup
application, might sit idle during the day. With Insight
Dynamics – VSE, you have the information you need to
confidently shift certain daytime workloads to the idle
server, so you can take advantage of the open
computing capacity.
This day-to-day work can make a big difference in the
life of your data center. You’re not locked into the rigid
allocation of resources. You can complement your longterm
consolidation initiatives with continuous optimization
of resources. You can initially deploy resources in one
place and then later move workloads to systems that
have free capacity—fine tuning your environment on an
as-needed basis. By optimizing utilization continuously,
you can save valuable real estate, avoid costly expansion
projects and extend the life of your data center.
Dynamic test and development
infrastructure
Quickly repurpose infrastructure without reinstallation.
Today, test and development teams wrestle with
inefficiencies. Average server utilization in test
environments is often in the single digits. Moving,
testing or troubleshooting applications on standalone
servers can be a cumbersome process that
stretches across multiple organizations.
Compared with production environments, test and
development environments need to be set up quickly.
They are often used for a relatively short period of time,
and then they are retired. What’s more, the actual
demand on the workload is usually characterized by
short, high levels of utilization, followed by long periods
of little or no use.
Given these operating circumstances, test and
development environments need more than static,
stand-alone servers. They are best placed in an agile
computing environment, in which resources can be easily
reallocated throughout the test and development lifecycle.
While virtual servers are a common approach, they are
not suited for all test environments.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables a more dynamic
test and development environment for both physical and
virtual servers. It allows you to quickly create, distribute
and tear down development and test environments. This
is made possible by the use of logical server profiles.
This is one of the keys to accelerating the developmentto-
production cycle.
Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you accelerate time to
production by sharing hardware between test and
development teams and archiving test environments for
reuse, a task that can usually be accomplished in a
matter of minutes. This is one of the keys to maintaining
a dynamic test and development infrastructure that can
respond faster to business needs.
6
Everyday high availability
Enable fast and affordable recovery and maintenance.
High system availability is now an imperative for an
increasing number of applications. If your business
depends on certain applications, it can’t tolerate
downtime for those applications. Yet in many cases
the use of high availability (HA) failover is restricted
to a limited number of business-critical applications
in complex, clustered configurations.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE changes the ground rules
for HA. It introduces the concept of “everyday high
availability” for a wide range of applications. You
can now protect more of your systems and shrink
maintenance windows using spare capacity that is
fast and affordable to set up, using existing virtual
machines or physical servers.
During periods of unplanned downtime, you can use
Insight Dynamics – VSE to shift workloads to physical
servers or virtual machines at an alternate location
to enable higher availability for certain applications.
This is made possible by the use of logical servers that
can be easily created and freely moved across your
infrastructure. This is the same approach that is used
to enable an agile test and development environment.
It’s now being used to support a simple, everyday
HA environment.
“Freezing” and “thawing” profiles
The blade profile can be stored as ready-to-use, or
“freeze-dried.” Then in the event of unplanned downtime,
you can use a spare blade (either locally or at a
distance) to get the profile up and running, or “thawed,”
in about the time it takes to re-boot a system.
These same capabilities help you maintain availability
during planned maintenance. When you’re ready to take
a server down for maintenance, you can easily move
a blade or virtual machine over to another physical
location. After you have updated the firmware or made
other changes to the hardware, you can then move the
logical servers back to their original systems.
This can help you shrink maintenance windows
considerably when compared to the time needed to
bring a server down for the entire duration of the
maintenance work. And because you can shrink the
window, this maintenance can often be done at more
convenient times than, say, Sunday at 3 a.m.
Energy-aware capacity planning
Consolidate workloads for increased power efficiency.
Power, cooling and space are top expenses and
limitations in today’s data centers. Energy not only
costs more, but data centers are using more of it. It’s no
surprise then that energy expenditures are taking an everlarger
bite out of operating expenditure (OPEX) budgets.
And, regardless of the cost issues, some data centers are
having trouble acquiring sufficient power to meet their
energy needs. In this new era, power and cooling
becomes a key consideration when planning a
technology environment or adding hardware to
an existing data center.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you overcome your
power and cooling challenges by enabling energy-aware
capacity planning. It gives you the hard data you need
to intelligently plan for your server capacity and power
needs, taking service levels into account. In addition to
considering metrics on CPU, memory utilization and disk
storage capacity, it helps your planning staff take a hard
look at your power consumption.
Insight Dynamics – VSE can show you the power
implications of different scenarios. For example, you can
run scenarios that show what happens under different
consolidation approaches and compare different
configurations to determine your best options for power
utilization. The software’s five-star rating system helps
you quickly see your best choices for provisioning and
redeploying servers in an energy-efficient manner.
These kinds of insights ease your energy pains through
better utilization of power and cooling resources and
better placement of workloads. By quickly identifying and
consolidating inefficient servers onto fewer, more powerefficient
ones, you can reduce energy consumption, cut
costs and extend the life of your data center.
Key takeaways
A new class of management software
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE allows you to continuously
analyze and optimize your Adaptive Infrastructure. It’s
the industry’s first integrated solution to visualize, plan
and change physical and virtual resources. The
software brings the freedom and flexibility of
virtualization to physical infrastructure.
7
An integrated management tool
Insight Dynamics – VSE brings together the best of our
industry-leading infrastructure management portfolio,
including HP Systems Insight Manager, HP Insight
Control and HP Virtual Server Environment, into one
integrated offering. It provides a toolkit to help you
accelerate complex technology projects, simplify daily
operations and proactively manage data center
capacity.
Business-driven benefits
Insight Dynamics – VSE can help you cut operational
costs and adapt your infrastructure as your business
grows. It is designed to accelerate project schedules
and reduce the number of steps and costs associated
with common data center tasks, such as server
provisioning, upgrades and changes, with cost savings
of up to 40 percent in key areas. It enables you to
proactively manage data center capacity to free
untapped resources and make better use of power,
cooling and space.
Key capabilities
Insight Dynamics – VSE has three key capabilities:
• Logical server profiles that bring the freedom and
flexibility of virtualization to physical servers
(available first on the HP BladeSystem using ProLiant
server blades)
• Real-time capacity planning to continuously analyze
and optimize server capacity and power use
•Unified control of physical and virtual resources,
based on HP Systems Insight Manager
Key use cases
Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you tackle some of your
toughest technology projects and top business priorities
in previously unimaginable ways. It enables:
•Continuous consolidation
•Dynamic test and development infrastructure
• Everyday high availability
• Energy-aware capacity planning
For more information
To learn more about HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
software, visit www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics,
where you can register to be informed when the
product is released later in 2008.
To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is the world’s first integrated
solution that lets you continuously analyze and optimize
your physical and virtual resources in exactly the
same way. It combines the best of the industry-leading
HP infrastructure management portfolio—including
HP Systems Insight Manager, HP Insight Control and
HP Virtual Server Environment—into one integrated
offering for HP BladeSystem, ProLiant and Integrity
servers. The result is a single toolkit that helps you
accelerate complex technology projects and simplify
daily operations. Insight Dynamics – VSE enables a
change-ready infrastructure, with all the freedom and
flexibility of virtualization delivered across your
physical infrastructure.
New management
challenges
To deliver better business outcomes, today’s data centers
need to make better use of their resources. Many suffer
from a proliferation of under-utilized servers that take up
valuable floor space, drive up power and cooling
costs, and put a strain on management resources.
Server virtualization helps data centers use resources
more efficiently. Virtualization is more than proven
to lower costs and increase flexibility. But virtual
environments bring their own set of management
challenges. So even with virtualized solutions in place,
data centers around the world continue to wrestle with
cost, time, quality and energy issues. These issues are
the heart of the need for HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
software.
Lower cost
Controlling virtual server sprawl
High on this list of virtualization challenges is the need to
combat “virtual sprawl”—which comes on top of the preexisting
problem of physical server sprawl. With the ease
of deploying virtual machines (VMs), many companies
have found themselves with a proliferation of virtual
servers, which creates a whole new set of management
challenges. Ideally, virtual servers should be provisioned
and governed under the same policies you use for your
physical servers. That’s one of the keys to simplifying
management of a virtualized technology environment.
Improving capacity planning
When it comes time for evaluating data center
capacity requirements, many data center managers
find themselves living with spreadsheets and best
guesses about their dynamic environments. This leads
to costly over-provisioning of resources—just to be
sure that systems can meet the peak needs of some
applications. So capacity waste becomes a part of
day-to-day business.
To solve this problem, you need better knowledge of
your environment, including detailed information on
system usage and workloads. That is one of the keys
to allocating virtual and physical resources in a more
flexible manner—and to avoiding over-provisioning.
But to make this shift to a more flexible world, you
first need better tools for capacity planning and
resource optimization.
2
Accelerate speed of change
Unifying management of virtual and physical resources
Virtualized environments can easily become silos that
require their own tools, skills sets and processes. This
is often the case. Many virtualized data centers have
one team to manage virtual machines and another to
manage physical servers. Each team has its own
processes and many organizations employ more than
one type of virtualization technology.
That kind of duplication is costly. It drains staff
productivity, drives up training costs and forces your
company to buy, use and manage different sets of
management software. In a better world, physical
servers and virtual machines would be managed
together—in the same way, by the same people, using
the same tools, under the same processes.
Simplifying consolidation
When it comes to server consolidation, data centers
are caught in a paradox: They find themselves using
a complex, time-consuming process in an attempt to
reduce complexity and lower cost. In a recent study by
Forrester, nearly 75 percent of respondents reported
that their consolidation projects took more than a
year, and in some cases several years, to complete.1
Extensive planning, manual work and involvement
of many different parts of the organization make
consolidation a laborious task.
To achieve a greater range of benefits from
consolidation, your organization needs tools that allow
you to transform project-based consolidation into a
routine initiative to rebalance and tune the infrastructure
to generate ongoing incremental benefits. In particular,
you need tools that provide real-time information on
server workloads, available capacity and opportunities
to shift workloads among physical servers and virtual
machines.
Deliver higher quality of service
Extending high availability to more applications
High availability usually means resource-intensive
clustering solutions, which aren’t appropriate for all
applications. Yet the success of your organization
probably depends on the availability of many
applications, both large and small. To keep your
business operating at its peak and enhance the
quality of services you deliver, you need ways to
extend high availability features, along with fast
recovery capabilities, to the full breadth of your
applications.
Extending the benefits of virtualization to your
entire infrastructure
For most organizations, the suggestion to “virtualize
everything” is not a viable option. Many workloads
are not suitable for deployment in virtual machines.
According to a leading analyst firm, by the end of
the decade, only half of all server workloads will
be virtualized.
Applications that run on physical servers can be timeconsuming
and resource-intensive to deploy, manage
and recover. When you need to make changes in the
physical servers, chances are you are going to have
to involve multiple organizations. That invariably takes
time and drives up costs. What’s needed is a way to
extend the freedom and efficiency of virtualization to
physical servers, as well as virtual machines.
Increase energy efficiency
Consolidating power-hungry servers
In data centers around the world, energy costs are
rising rapidly and consuming an ever-greater portion
of technology budgets. Data center electricity use has
more than doubled since 2000, according to a recent
study. The same study found that the total electric bill
for operating data center servers and associated
infrastructure was about $2.7 billion in the United
States and $7.2 billion in the world. And all the while,
the cost of energy has been spiraling upward.
To control rising energy expenditures, data center
managers need to find ways to consolidate powerhungry
servers and factor energy consumption into
capacity planning decisions. Here again, this takes
better information, including tools that allow you to
make energy usage a key part of your capacity
planning decisions.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE was designed specifically to
address these challenges that come with the optimization
of a virtual and physical environment.
1 Forrester Research, Inc.: “How Large Enterprises Approach IT Infrastructure
Consolidation” December 2007
2 “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers In the U.S. and the World,”
Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and Consulting Professor, Stanford University, February 15, 2007.
http://enterprise.amd.com/Downloads/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
3
Overcoming the
challenges with HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is a new class of
management software that allows you to continuously
analyze and optimize your Adaptive Infrastructure. It’s
the world’s first integrated solution that lets you visualize,
plan and change physical and virtual resources in
exactly the same way.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps your enterprise:
• Reduce costs—HP estimates the software will cut the
cost of common data center tasks by as much as 40
percent, reducing costs associated with capacity
planning, provisioning, upgrades and changes, and
energy. Your enterprise can realize the cost benefits of
virtualization faster by cutting analysis time for capacity
planning and consolidation from months to days.
Complex Excel spreadsheets or expensive services
engagements are replaced by instantly available data.
• Increase speed of change—By collapsing steps and
saving administrative time with key tasks, enterprises
can accelerate key technology projects. For example,
moving a workload from one server to another with
a simple drag-and-drop function takes minutes,
while conventional approaches take weeks and
often require extensive coordination among server,
storage and networking groups.
• Improve quality—Insight Dynamics – VSE software
enables everyday high availability previously
unavailable to many applications due to complex
and potentially expensive clustering requirements.
By easily redeploying logical servers in the event of
hardware failure, you can enjoy fast and affordable
protection.
•Manage energy—Consolidation and virtualization
are great ways to save energy. But your actual
power savings may depend on the choices you
make. Insight Dynamics – VSE makes comparing
energy consumption of different data center
configurations easy.
In essence, Insight Dynamics – VSE enables your
organization to get ahead of the curve by giving you
the information you need to proactively deal with
potential issues (such as performance, power and
space constraints) before they become problems that
impact your business. You no longer have to wait for
a server to be overloaded or to experience an outage
requiring a recovery. And if failures do occur, the
logical server capability of Insight Dynamics – VSE, and
the fast provisioning it enables, makes recovery fast and
easy to execute. You can now use Insight Dynamics –
VSE to ward off problems by balancing resources
across your data center to enable higher levels of
availability and quality of service.
4
Bringing the flexibility of virtualization to physical servers
A logical server profile is easily created and freely moved across physical and virtual machines.
Logical servers can be physical blade servers, virtual machines or offline templates.
Virtual fabric Virtual fabric
Logical server
Server
Image Configuration
requirements
Unique
IDs
Logical server
Server Server Server
Image Configuration
requirements
Unique
IDs
Key product
capabilities
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE includes three key capabilities
that drive value across your data center. These are logical
servers, real-time capacity planning, and unified control
of physical and virtual infrastructure.
The logical server
Logical servers bring the freedom and flexibility of
virtualization to physical servers. The logical server is
a server profile that is easily created and freely moved
across physical and virtual machines. By detaching
the logical identity from the physical resource, you
can create or move logical servers on any suitable
virtual or physical machine—on demand.
So what makes up a logical server? A logical server
profile describes the system image resources, whether
these are virtual, physical, shared or unshared. For
example, a logical server profile would include
entitlements such as power allocation, processor and
memory requirements, network connections, and
storage—everything that the OS and application
stack require to operate.
With a logical server approach, you can even create
templates for your frequently used applications with
specific configurations. These templates can be stored
and reactivated in minutes, when needed. The capability
to move server profiles across physical servers is
available first on HP BladeSystems with ProLiant server
blades and shortly thereafter with HP Integrity server
blades.
Real-time capacity planning
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is also the industry’s most
advanced real-time capacity planning tool. It allows you
to continuously analyze server capacity and power use.
It collects and analyzes millions of historical data points
from virtual and physical resources. Then, using new
Smart Solver technology developed by HP Labs, it can
show you the best fit for your workloads, reducing the
number of physical servers you need.
With the five-star rating system of Insight Dynamics –
VSE, you’ll see in real time if a logical server can be
moved. If so, you can actually drag and drop the logical
server to place it in the new location. Like having a team
of Ph.D.s behind you, Insight Dynamics – VSE takes
the tedious research and guesswork out of traditional
capacity planning. And with energy usage awareness
built in, based on more than a thousand data points
per server per day, you can make decisions on the fly
to make your data center more energy-efficient than
ever before.
Unified control
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE allows you to control physical
and virtual resources in exactly the same way. It extends
the capabilities of HP Systems Insight Manager—the
infrastructure management platform used by more
companies than any other—to allow you to see all
available resources on a single screen. And Insight
Dynamics – VSE is designed to manage leading
virtualization technologies from VMware, Citrix and
Microsoft®.
You can drill down as far as you need to without logging
into another tool. And because it’s one integrated
design, you can use Insight Dynamics – VSE to simplify
and standardize your organizational processes, without
actually changing them.
Lifecycle services
HP offers services to assist with virtualization in
each phase of the technology lifecycle. HP services
professionals will help with installation and ongoing
support of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE, while evolving
your virtualization initiative to a strategic enabler of
the business.
Lifecycle services include:
• Strategy—Understand the potential of HP Insight
Dynamics – VSE and assess its impact, along with the
impact of your existing virtualization solutions, on your
current environments.
•Design and integration of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
into your technology management and automation
framework across the data center.
• Installation and implementation HP Insight Dynamics –
VSE into your existing environment.
• Transition—Migration of legacy environments into the
new virtualization architecture that includes HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE.
• Support for your HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
solution 24x7.
•Continually improve on service levels to the business.
Delivery options
Starting in Q2 2008, you will be able to purchase
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE in one of two ways. For
HP ProLiant servers, the software will be delivered
through a new HP Insight Dynamics – VSE package,
building on the Insight Control Environment. For HP
Integrity servers, the functionality will be delivered as an
update to the proven Virtual Server Environment Suite,
extending that already strong offering with new
advanced capabilities.
5
New ways to tackle
the toughest technology
projects
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE creates new possibilities for
addressing your toughest technology challenges and top
business priorities in previously unimaginable ways.
Here are a few of the ways to put the software to
work to drive better business outcomes:
Continuous consolidation
Transform long-term projects into ongoing efforts.
Today, server consolidation is typically conducted one
project at a time, often over one to five years. Once
completed, the process begins again. HP Insight
Dynamics – VSE changes the ground rules of the
consolidation game. It accelerates your large-scale
consolidation projects and then lets you optimize
your resource on a more continuous basis.
First, Insight Dynamics – VSE lets you quickly evaluate
different scenarios for consolidating older and underutilized
physical servers onto virtual machines. Using
thousands of historical data points for each server, you
can simulate different workload configurations on
different sets of server resources. You can automatically
find best-fit solutions for dozens of servers, or even more.
And you can easily see which alternatives use the least
computing power, the least space, even the least energy.
Then HP Insight Dynamics – VSE gives you the
information you need to quickly rebalance and
repurpose infrastructure based on changing technology
and business priorities. When you need to deploy
a new workload, the five-star rating system lets you
instantly see the best place to put it in your existing
infrastructure. Using logical servers, you can then
drag and drop the workload onto a suitable virtual
or physical server that has free capacity.
You can quickly recognize opportunities to rebalance
workloads—identifying servers that often push their
capacity limits, and then shift the loads to servers that
are often under-utilized. You can see how repurposing
infrastructure could make you more efficient. A server
that runs certain workloads at night, such as a backup
application, might sit idle during the day. With Insight
Dynamics – VSE, you have the information you need to
confidently shift certain daytime workloads to the idle
server, so you can take advantage of the open
computing capacity.
This day-to-day work can make a big difference in the
life of your data center. You’re not locked into the rigid
allocation of resources. You can complement your longterm
consolidation initiatives with continuous optimization
of resources. You can initially deploy resources in one
place and then later move workloads to systems that
have free capacity—fine tuning your environment on an
as-needed basis. By optimizing utilization continuously,
you can save valuable real estate, avoid costly expansion
projects and extend the life of your data center.
Dynamic test and development
infrastructure
Quickly repurpose infrastructure without reinstallation.
Today, test and development teams wrestle with
inefficiencies. Average server utilization in test
environments is often in the single digits. Moving,
testing or troubleshooting applications on standalone
servers can be a cumbersome process that
stretches across multiple organizations.
Compared with production environments, test and
development environments need to be set up quickly.
They are often used for a relatively short period of time,
and then they are retired. What’s more, the actual
demand on the workload is usually characterized by
short, high levels of utilization, followed by long periods
of little or no use.
Given these operating circumstances, test and
development environments need more than static,
stand-alone servers. They are best placed in an agile
computing environment, in which resources can be easily
reallocated throughout the test and development lifecycle.
While virtual servers are a common approach, they are
not suited for all test environments.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables a more dynamic
test and development environment for both physical and
virtual servers. It allows you to quickly create, distribute
and tear down development and test environments. This
is made possible by the use of logical server profiles.
This is one of the keys to accelerating the developmentto-
production cycle.
Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you accelerate time to
production by sharing hardware between test and
development teams and archiving test environments for
reuse, a task that can usually be accomplished in a
matter of minutes. This is one of the keys to maintaining
a dynamic test and development infrastructure that can
respond faster to business needs.
6
Everyday high availability
Enable fast and affordable recovery and maintenance.
High system availability is now an imperative for an
increasing number of applications. If your business
depends on certain applications, it can’t tolerate
downtime for those applications. Yet in many cases
the use of high availability (HA) failover is restricted
to a limited number of business-critical applications
in complex, clustered configurations.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE changes the ground rules
for HA. It introduces the concept of “everyday high
availability” for a wide range of applications. You
can now protect more of your systems and shrink
maintenance windows using spare capacity that is
fast and affordable to set up, using existing virtual
machines or physical servers.
During periods of unplanned downtime, you can use
Insight Dynamics – VSE to shift workloads to physical
servers or virtual machines at an alternate location
to enable higher availability for certain applications.
This is made possible by the use of logical servers that
can be easily created and freely moved across your
infrastructure. This is the same approach that is used
to enable an agile test and development environment.
It’s now being used to support a simple, everyday
HA environment.
“Freezing” and “thawing” profiles
The blade profile can be stored as ready-to-use, or
“freeze-dried.” Then in the event of unplanned downtime,
you can use a spare blade (either locally or at a
distance) to get the profile up and running, or “thawed,”
in about the time it takes to re-boot a system.
These same capabilities help you maintain availability
during planned maintenance. When you’re ready to take
a server down for maintenance, you can easily move
a blade or virtual machine over to another physical
location. After you have updated the firmware or made
other changes to the hardware, you can then move the
logical servers back to their original systems.
This can help you shrink maintenance windows
considerably when compared to the time needed to
bring a server down for the entire duration of the
maintenance work. And because you can shrink the
window, this maintenance can often be done at more
convenient times than, say, Sunday at 3 a.m.
Energy-aware capacity planning
Consolidate workloads for increased power efficiency.
Power, cooling and space are top expenses and
limitations in today’s data centers. Energy not only
costs more, but data centers are using more of it. It’s no
surprise then that energy expenditures are taking an everlarger
bite out of operating expenditure (OPEX) budgets.
And, regardless of the cost issues, some data centers are
having trouble acquiring sufficient power to meet their
energy needs. In this new era, power and cooling
becomes a key consideration when planning a
technology environment or adding hardware to
an existing data center.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you overcome your
power and cooling challenges by enabling energy-aware
capacity planning. It gives you the hard data you need
to intelligently plan for your server capacity and power
needs, taking service levels into account. In addition to
considering metrics on CPU, memory utilization and disk
storage capacity, it helps your planning staff take a hard
look at your power consumption.
Insight Dynamics – VSE can show you the power
implications of different scenarios. For example, you can
run scenarios that show what happens under different
consolidation approaches and compare different
configurations to determine your best options for power
utilization. The software’s five-star rating system helps
you quickly see your best choices for provisioning and
redeploying servers in an energy-efficient manner.
These kinds of insights ease your energy pains through
better utilization of power and cooling resources and
better placement of workloads. By quickly identifying and
consolidating inefficient servers onto fewer, more powerefficient
ones, you can reduce energy consumption, cut
costs and extend the life of your data center.
Key takeaways
A new class of management software
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE allows you to continuously
analyze and optimize your Adaptive Infrastructure. It’s
the industry’s first integrated solution to visualize, plan
and change physical and virtual resources. The
software brings the freedom and flexibility of
virtualization to physical infrastructure.
7
An integrated management tool
Insight Dynamics – VSE brings together the best of our
industry-leading infrastructure management portfolio,
including HP Systems Insight Manager, HP Insight
Control and HP Virtual Server Environment, into one
integrated offering. It provides a toolkit to help you
accelerate complex technology projects, simplify daily
operations and proactively manage data center
capacity.
Business-driven benefits
Insight Dynamics – VSE can help you cut operational
costs and adapt your infrastructure as your business
grows. It is designed to accelerate project schedules
and reduce the number of steps and costs associated
with common data center tasks, such as server
provisioning, upgrades and changes, with cost savings
of up to 40 percent in key areas. It enables you to
proactively manage data center capacity to free
untapped resources and make better use of power,
cooling and space.
Key capabilities
Insight Dynamics – VSE has three key capabilities:
• Logical server profiles that bring the freedom and
flexibility of virtualization to physical servers
(available first on the HP BladeSystem using ProLiant
server blades)
• Real-time capacity planning to continuously analyze
and optimize server capacity and power use
•Unified control of physical and virtual resources,
based on HP Systems Insight Manager
Key use cases
Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you tackle some of your
toughest technology projects and top business priorities
in previously unimaginable ways. It enables:
•Continuous consolidation
•Dynamic test and development infrastructure
• Everyday high availability
• Energy-aware capacity planning
For more information
To learn more about HP Insight Dynamics – VSE
software, visit www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics,
where you can register to be informed when the
product is released later in 2008.
To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics
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