Hp Blade servers, HP SIM and virtualcenter

[dphowes]

Ok, I am looking to test out some of these pre-emptive failover features I hear banded around some of the vmware demo's I have been to.

From what I understand, if you are using the virtual machine management pack with HP SIM, you can use SIM to set up alerts to automatically failover vm's from a host if you get a pre-emptive notice something is going to go amiss. (e.g. sudden rise in room blade temperature, cpu starts to glow in the dark etc )

If I want to test this feature, am I locked into using HP's own managment pack for handling the VM's or is there some way to still keep virtualcenter as the main VM management server

[mreferre]

I don't see Ken jumping on this thread so I might give you my idea.

As you might depict from my e-mail address I am not familiar with the HP kits but we (ibm) have a similar feature that would allow you, based on a hardware alert detected by the hw management platform, to instruct Virtual Center to initiate an evaquations of vm's (via VMotion) on a host that is likely to fail due to anticipated potential hw issues.

From what I can tell HP is using the same paradigm that is:

\- their "proprietary" management platform detects the potential hw issue

\- their "proprietary" management platform instructs VC to do things.

From a technical perspective you HAVE TO HAVE VC to do certain things (such as VMotion for example).

Massimo.

P.S. when I say "proprietary" I mean that it is very hw specific ....

[Ken_Cline]

Massimo has it pretty well right. The SIM agents on the host detect a potential problem and notifies the SIM console/VMM. VMM has the intelligence to know which VMs are on the host and begins evacuating them to other hosts.

IBM Director has similar functionality, and you can roll your own. Basically, you need something to tell you there's a problem brewing and something to react to the notification. That something needs to know the inventory of VMs running on the host and the hosts that are available to migrate VMs to.

All VMM does (this is true for MOST applications!) is to package the intelligence into a neat little black box that's easier to use.

And yes, you DO have to have VirtualCenter to actually do the VMotion.

[dpomeroy]

If you do test this please try to update this thread if you can, I would be very interested in how your testing worked out.

No offense to Massimo or Ken, but I'm not sure I trust SIM or Director enough to let them initiate VMotions.

[mreferre]

Don,

no offense at all !

Massimo.

[Ken_Cline]

No offense to Massimo or Ken

Don, I'm highly offended! Geez, you put Massimo's name first...

[daniel_uk]

For 300 Dollars a pop for a VMM license it had better get vmotioning when something goes tits up!

The idea in all of this is good but ive never really found any solid resource for this, do you have a link Ken?

[mreferre]

Yeah Don ..... how come ? Why me first ?

Massimo.

[Ken_Cline]

ProLiant Essentials Virtualization Management Software[/url] is about the best I can do...if you need more than that, I'd ping your HP rep - if that doesn't help, let me know what questions you have and I'll dig around for answers.

[halfbegone]

How do the instructions from VMM interact with the HA/DRS functionality of VC? Does VMM or VC decide where the VM's go? Does VMM put the host in maintenance mode?

[dconvery]

Is this automatic by virtue of having SIM/VMM configured and recognizing VC and the ESX hosts? Or is it something that must be configured?

Dave

[dphowes]

Sorry I have not replied to this thread in a while. After some investigation, we were able to adapt some legacy C programming from pre-VI3 ESX days to intelligently query VC, check the average utilisation across the available ESX farm and vmotion the virtual servers across the available farm.

After all Vm's were moved off by the program, we were then able to call an internal script in ESX to push it into maintenance mode.

This was all pretty messy and had to be emulated through VI3's legacy support but it proved proof of concept.

After speaking to some folks at TSX this year (lovely choice of venue city by the way guys ), I found out there is apparently better support of calling maintenance mode via some of the SDK perl scripts.

This will be our next port of call to bring this up to a production standard idea.

[kareldr]

Massimo, you have mentioned you at IBM have the similar feature. We have VI3 on three x3950. Do you have some experience with this on those machines? Thanks for any help.

Karel

[mreferre]

Karel,

this would be the thing:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/management/director/extensions/vm.html

For more info refer to this ...

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247190.html?Open

Specifically pragraphs 5.5 / 5.6 for some scenarios.

Massimo.