Integrity Virtual Machines is a soft partitioning and virtualization
technology that provides operating system isolation, with sub-CPU allocation
granularity and shared I/O. The Virtual Machines environment consists of two
types of components:
Virtual machines (also called guests)
The VM Host virtualizes the CPU, memory, and I/O devices, presenting
abstractions to the guests, allowing you to allocate the resources each guest
requires, providing complete control over resources, flexible management,
and efficient use of the system's physical resources.
Virtual machines are abstractions of real, physical machines. The guest
runs on the virtaul machine with little or no special modification, except
for a small guest package provided by Integrity VM for local management of
the guest's virtual machine.
Guests are fully-loaded, operational systems, complete with operating
system, system management utilities, applications, and networks, all running
in the virtual machine environment that you set up for them. You boot and
manage guests using the same storage media and procedures that you would if
the guest operating system were running on its own dedicated physical hardware
platform. Even the system administration privileges can be allocated to specific
virtual machine administrators.
One way to take advantage of Integrity VM is to run multiple virtual
machines on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine is isolated from
the others. The VM Host administrator allocates virtual resources to the guest.
A symmetric multiprocessing system can run on the virtual machine if the VM
Host system has sufficient physical CPUs for it. The guest accesses the number
of CPUs that the VM Host administrator allocates to it. CPU use is governed
by an entitlement system that you can adjust to maximize CPU use and improve
performance.
Because multiple virtual machines share the same physical resources,
I/O devices can also be allocated to multiple guests, maximizing use of the
I/O devices and reducing the maintenance costs of the data center. By consolidating
systems onto one platform, your data center requires less hardware and management
resources.
Another use for virtual machines is to duplicate operating environments
easily, maintaining isolation on each virtual machine while managing them
from a single, central console. Integrity VM allows you to create and clone
virtual machines with a simple command interface. You can modify existing
guests and arrange networks that provide communication through the VM Host's
network interface or the localnet that the VM Host creates for each guest
by default. The localnet allows communication among guests; the VM Host does
not communicate on the localnet. Because all the guests share the same physical
resources, you can be assured of identical configurations, including the hardware
devices backing each guest's virtual devices. Testing upgraded software and
system modifications is a simple matter of entering a few commands to create,
monitor, and remove virtual machines.
Integrity VM can improve availability and capacity of your data center.
Virtual machines can be used to run isolated environments that support different
applications on the same physical hardware. Application failures and system
events on one virtual machine do not affect the other virtual machines. I/O
devices allocated to multiple virtual machines allow more users per device,
enabling the data center to support more users and applications on fewer expensive
hardware platforms and devices.
Features of Integrity VM |
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Support for a variety of HP Integrity servers, from low-end
Blade servers to high-end multiprocessing systems.
Support for single processor and multiprocessing virtual machines.
Support for virtual machines running different operating system
versions and patch levels.
Fine-grained allocation of physical CPUs to virtual CPUs.
Dynamic, automatic reallocation of CPU resources to virtual
CPUs based on utilization.
Guest operating system fault and security isolation.
Virtual machine management isolation that allows you to boot,
reconfigure, add, and remove virtual machines without affecting the other
virtual machines.
Centralized VM Host administration to create, remove, and
modify guests from a single, central console.
Powerful, easy-to-use command line interface to manage the
VM Host and virtual machines.
Ability to share I/O resources among guests for maximum utilization
without conflicts.
Multiple options for physical storage backing virtual disks
on the guests, including:
Physical disks/partitions
Virtual DVDs backed by either physical DVDs or ISO files.
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