HP UX vPars and Integrity VM v6 manual Introduction, HP Integrity Virtual Machines

1 Introduction

This document helps you understand and use Integrity Virtual Machines Manager.

The audience for this document includes system administrators and others responsible for maintaining an Integrity VM host and its virtual machines. You should be familiar with the HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) product and HP-UX system administration using either HP SMH or HP Systems Insight Manager.

This chapter provides an overview of HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager (VM Manager) and the product that it manages, HP Integrity Virtual Machines. This chapter also lists the basic management tasks you can perform using VM Manager.

HP Integrity Virtual Machines

HP Integrity Virtual Machines (Integrity VM) is a soft partitioning and virtualization technology that enables you to create multiple software-controlled Itanium-based virtual machines within a single HP Integrity server, Integrity blade, or nPartition. The Integrity server or nPartition acts as a VM Host for the virtual machines (virtual machines are also called guests). The VM Host is a platform manager. It manages hardware resources such as memory, CPU allocation, and I/O devices, and shares them among multiple virtual machines. The VM Host runs a version of the HP-UX operating system and can be managed using standard HP-UX management tools. HP Integrity VM 4.0 and later runs on HP-UX v3 only. Version 3.5 runs on HP-UX v2 only.

The virtual machines share a single set of physical hardware resources, yet each virtual machine is a complete environment in itself and runs its own instance of an operating system (called a guest OS). As with a real machine, the virtual machine contains:

•At least one processor core, also referred to as a virtual CPU or vCPU

•Memory

•Disks

•Networking cards

•A keyboard

•A console

•Other components of a computer

All these elements are virtual, meaning that they are at least partially emulated in software rather than fully implemented in hardware; however, to the guest OS they appear as if they are real, physical components.

No guest OS can access memory allocated to another guest OS. One virtual machine is not affected by software events on another virtual machine, such as faults or planned software downtimes. Integrity VM optimizes the utilization of hardware resources, quickly allocating resources such as processor cores, memory, or I/O bandwidth to the virtual machines as needed. Any software that runs on supported versions of HP-UX can run in an Integrity VM virtual machine. No recompiling, recertification, or changes are required for applications to run in a guest OS. Applications run in the guest OS as they do on any operating system.

The operating systems supported on guests vary from version to version of HP Integrity Virtual Machines. For information about supported VM guest operating systems, see the version of the HP Integrity Virtual Machines Installation, Configuration, and Administration manual that corresponds to the version of HP Integrity Virtual Machines being used.

HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager

HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager (VM Manager, also called vmmgr) is the GUI that you can use from your browser to manage Integrity VM resources. VM Manager allows you to create,

HP Integrity Virtual Machines 7