The complex tasks of managing and linking business priorities to the appropriate resource allocations are handled by the highly integrated components of the VSE portfolio of solutions:

•HP Serviceguard and SGeRAC

•HP Partitioning Continuum

•HP-UX Workload Manager (WLM) and HP Global Workload Manager (gWLM)

•HP Instant Capacity and Temporary Instant Capacity

HP SGeRAC brings data protection, application availability, and ease of management to servers and server partitions to create an enterprise cluster that delivers highly available application services to LAN-attached clients. HP Serviceguard monitors the health of each node and responds to failures in a way that minimizes or eliminates application downtime. When used in conjunction with SGeRAC, it allows for rapid and transparent recovery from LAN and application failures, while still maintaining scalability, data integrity, and configuration flexibility.

HP Partitioning Continuum components are the industry’s broadest range of hard and virtual partitions, and they offer partitioning tools that provide resource flexibility, improved system utilization, and lower costs in consolidated environments while maintaining the appropriate level of isolation. The flexibility of HP Partitioning Continuum is automated with WLM and gWLM, which can reallocate resources between partitions based on business policies and real-time requirements.

WLM provides automatic resource allocation and application performance management through the use of prioritized service level objectives on a single system. It is the key to enabling applications to be stacked. Goal-based resource management provides highly predictable response times for all mission-critical applications, regardless of their location. The tight integration of HP Serviceguard and WLM allows CPU and memory resources to be assigned to specific HP Serviceguard packages after a failover. gWLM builds on WLM and provides similar resource management functionality. gWLM has been designed for a centralized IT environment and employs a central management station to facilitate resource management implementation across multiple systems.

Both WLM and gWLM guarantee computing resources to mission-critical applications but allow lower- priority applications to utilize those resources when they are otherwise unneeded by the mission- critical applications. In a SGeRAC implementation, one or more SGeRAC instances can be stacked on the same infrastructure with the appropriate level of isolation while low-priority applications can use the rest of the available computing cycles. For example, if a data center fails and the load significantly increases on the remaining data center, it automatically transfers resources from the lower-priority workloads to the Extended Cluster for RAC instances.

HP Instant Capacity is an innovative mechanism to rapidly respond to unpredictable business volatility through the deployment of preconfigured systems that provide additional computing capacity. Clients are charged when the additional resources are utilized. Instant Capacity provides a permanent capacity increase while Temporary Instant Capacity allows additional capacity to be activated and deactivated as required. Temporary Instant Capacity is integrated with WLM and gWLM 2.0+ to automatically activate and deactivate capacity as needed. When used with SGeRAC, if one data center goes offline and another data center picks up the load, additional CPU resources can automatically be brought online to help maintain service levels.

HP Extended Cluster for RAC

The solution components bring together the best aspects of HP VSE, the HP suite of clustering products, and Oracle RAC: comprehensive resource utilization, high availability, data integrity, scalability, and reduced administration costs. Compelling on their own, these characteristics are further complemented by the ability to share databases across multiple data centers, providing full disaster tolerance and unprecedented levels of risk mitigation and cost effectiveness.

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