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A key component of an Adaptive Infrastructure, as envisioned by HP, is the virtualization of resources. This section provides more information on these concepts.
Adaptive Infrastructure
The HP Adaptive Infrastructure strategy combines industry-leading solutions, services, and products from HP and partners that can help organizations quickly turn challenges into opportunities. This strategy is based on four design principles – simplification, standardization, integration, and modularity – which, when applied consistently across business processes, applications, and infrastructure, will ultimately lead to an organization that can adapt to – even embrace – change. These design principles are applied to individual elements of the IT infrastructure and the entire infrastructure itself; in this way, organizations can create consistent building blocks that can be combined as needed.
Adaptive Infrastructure is not a single product; it cannot be purchased “off the shelf”. It is a philosophy designed to make an organization agile and easily adaptive to changing business needs.
Virtual infrastructure
Virtualization is one of the cornerstones to an Adaptive Infrastructure. The primary benefit to virtualization may indeed be consolidation; however, a virtualized infrastructure can be beneficial in many other ways. For example, because an entire operating environment can be encapsulated in several files, that environment becomes easier to control, copy, distribute, and so on. If an organization virtualizes an operating system, its applications, configuration settings, and other desirable elements, that entire operating environment – known as a Virtual Machine (VM) – can be rolled out anywhere in the organization to maintain business continuity. To maximize availability, emerging technologies can allow VMs to automatically migrate from a potentially failing host to another virtualized platform – with little or no user intervention.
Virtualization planning
A virtual infrastructure offers many benefits, including more efficient use of resources, reduction in server sprawl, and reduced capital expenditures for test and development environments. Whatever your motive for moving to a virtualized environment, the key to a successful deployment is solid planning. This section guides you through the planning process.
Prior to reading the rest of the planning document, it is strongly suggested that you familiarize yourself with the architecture of VMware ESX Server and how it virtualizes the hardware. A VMware and HP coauthored white paper on the VMware ESX Server architecture can be found in the “white papers” section of www.hp.com/go/vmware.
Initial evaluation
While money, knowledge, and time are always project constraints to some degree, you should always ask the following high-level questions when undertaking a consolidation or virtualization project:
What are your currently useable resources?
– How many servers are currently in use?
– What is the knowledge level of virtualization?
The first step in the evaluation process is to collect a detailed inventory of the components of your computing environment. You should understand the server resources available to you and where these servers are located; it may be helpful to identify the entities that own and operate these resources. In addition to taking an inventory, you should also understand the performance characteristics of the workloads running on the servers; not all server workloads make good virtualization candidates. There may be other barriers that prevent a particular server from being virtualized, such as the need for I/O devices not supported inside a virtual machine.
Identifying appropriate performance metrics
It is essential to understand your current environment when evaluating candidates for virtualization. A wide range of metrics is available to help you characterize performance: for a web server, for example, you may choose to focus on requests/second or, for a database system, you may choose transactions/second. Although readily available, these can be closely-focused metrics that describe how an application is performing but provide little information on overall server performance. To better your computing environment, you need to understand performance at the server level – more precisely, at the levels of major server subsystems (CPU, memory, disk, and network). When gathering or analyzing performance data, you should focus on the metrics that describe what is happening at a physical level.
Data collection
Since performance characterization can only be as effective as the performance metrics collected, the largest and most critical part of the characterization process becomes data collection (sampling). Data should be sampled over as long a period as possible and should be representative of your business processes and cycles.
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