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Introduction
In today’s business environment, enterprises are looking for virtualization to help them get the most out of their IT investment while staying ahead of the pace of business change. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is an integrated solution that lets you analyze and optimize physical and virtual resources in exactly the same way. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE is built on proven Virtual Server Environment technology and provides a single toolkit that helps you accelerate complex IT projects and simplify daily operations. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE Reference Architectures demonstrate popular applications in integrated and pre-tested configurations. The reference architectures are designed to help you apply HP Insight Dynamics – VSE in your IT projects with ease and efficiency, and to help you reduce your project’s time to production.
Executive summary
To get the most out of their IT investment, enterprises are looking at IT as a corporate asset and differentiator rather than just an expense. To accomplish this, companies must take a different approach to designing the next generation data center. No longer is it sufficient for IT departments to take an application by application design approach to building a data center. An approach that can lead to increased levels of server sprawl and isolated pools of equipment dedicated to specific applications which are often over-provisioned and under-utilized.
To get the most out of your IT infrastructure, enterprises must design a data center that is adaptive to the needs of the business, with the flexibility to shift resources as the needs of the business change. This helps provide a higher return on your IT investment spending as resources can be more efficiently utilized and more quickly provisioned and re-provisioned. A key component to building this type of infrastructure is an intelligent software layer to analyze and optimize the next generation data center. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE provides this layer of intelligence in a unified, integrated management environment, building on the HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) framework, the HP BladeSystem architecture and HP Virtual Connect (VC) technology. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE can help you reduce costs by providing a flexible computing environment to help maximize the efficiency of server resource utilization and maintain server availability. Several key capabilities of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE such as logical servers, and capacity planning with HP Smart Solver technology provide administrators a way to quickly provision, move, plan, and reallocate resources as necessary to meet the application demands and reduce the costs of running their IT infrastructure.
This white paper focuses on the advantages of utilizing HP Insight Dynamics – VSE with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007. This paper will provide a brief overview on the HP Insight Dynamics – VSE software with a focus on logical servers and Capacity Advisor and covers several use-case scenarios for using HP Insight Dynamics – VSE in a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 environment. The first scenario looks at how logical servers can help when responding to increased resource consumption requirements. This involves moving an Exchange mailbox logical server supporting 1000 users from a single processor, dual-core HP ProLiant BL460c server blade with 8 gigabytes (GB) of memory, to a two processor, dual-core BL460c server blade with 16 GBs of memory, in response to an increase in the number of mailbox users to 2000. The second scenario discusses how logical servers can be used to increase server availability, both in a general Exchange sense, and specifically in an example using an Exchange mailbox server with local continuous replication (LCR) enabled.
Target audience: This white paper is intended for administrators or system architects that are responsible for planning, designing, or administering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The assumption is that the reader has a familiarity with Exchange Server 2007 as well as the HP BladeSystem architecture. The reader should also be generally familiar with HP Insight Dynamics – VSE. Please see the section at the end of this white paper for links to more information.
Conceptual overview
The HP Virtual Server Environment software has been available and in use supporting HP Integrity server environments. With the release of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE1, this capability is expanded to the HP ProLiant server line. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE extends the capability of HP Systems Insight Manager and HP Insight Control Environment to provide a unified management framework for continuously analyzing and optimizing both virtual and physical server resources across the entire infrastructure.
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