Integrity Virtual Machines is software from

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

that allows multiple

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

to run concurrently on any

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computin ...

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

running

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Ser ...

, notably the

HPE Integrity Servers HPE Integrity is a series of server computers produced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (formerly Hewlett-Packard) since 2003, based on the Itanium processor. The Integrity brand name was inherited by HP from Tandem Computers via Compaq. In 20 ...

line. It is part of HP's Virtual Server Environment suite. The product is optimized for

use.

History

Christophe de Dinechin initiated a

skunkworks project A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project, often with a very large degree of autonomy, primarily for the sake of radical innovation. The term orig ...

to virtualize Itanium, with the help of Jean-Marc Chevrot and of a "virtual team" of experienced HP engineers. A prototype of Integrity Virtual Machines was then developed between 2000 and 2003 by Christophe de Dinechin,

Todd Kjos Todd or Todds may refer to: Places ;Australia: * Todd River, an ephemeral river ;United States: * Todd Valley, California, also known as Todd, an unincorporated community * Todd, Missouri, a ghost town * Todd, North Carolina, an unincorporated ...

and

Jonathan Ross Jonathan Stephen Ross (born 17 November 1960) is an English broadcaster, film critic, comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He presented the BBC One chat show ''Friday Night with Jonathan Ross'' during the 2000s, hosted his own radio show on ...

. It was then turned into a full-fledged product by a larger team of experienced

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

Tru64 Unix Tru64 UNIX is a discontinued 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA), currently owned by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation ( ...

and

kernel engineers. * Version 1.0 and 1.2, released in 2005, ran

in virtual machines. * Version 2.0, released in November 2006, additionally supports

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...

, CD and DVD burners,

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

s and

VLAN A virtual local area network (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2).IEEE 802.1Q-2011, ''1.4 VLAN aims and benefits'' In this context, virtual, refers to a physi ...

. * Version 3.0, released in June 2007, supports

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

* Version 3.5, released in late 2007, supports

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...

, HP-UX 11i v3 guests, new service packs for Windows and Linux guests, and accelerated virtual I/O for HP-UX guests, enabling better I/O performance and a larger number of devices. * Version 4.0, released in September 2008, runs on

11.31 (also known as 11i v3), supports 8 virtual CPUs, capped CPU allocation (in addition to CPU entitlement as in previous releases), additional support for accelerated virtual I/O (AVIO), and a new VM performance analysis tool. Version 4.0 also includes beta functionality such as on-line migration and support for

guests. * Version 4.1, released in April 2009, supports Online VM Migration which allows customers to migrate active guests from one VM Host to another VM Host without service interruption. It also provides support for SSH third-party alternatives for secure communications, accelerated virtual I/O (AVIO) for networking on Windows and Linux guests, support for ignite and VxVM backing stores. * Version 4.2, released March 2010, supports encryption during a VM migration, brings support for newer Itanium hardware and VM Guest OS versions, contains software allowing for VMs as

Serviceguard HP Serviceguard, formerly known as MC/ServiceGuard, is a high-availability cluster software produced by HP that runs on HP-UX and Linux. Serviceguard has existed since 1990, which HP claims to have been the first high availability solution for UN ...

packages and Serviceguard Nodes, and support for automatic memory reallocation. It also added support for OpenVMS 8.4 guests. * Version 4.2.5, released September 2010, brings support for the HP Integrity Superdome 2, as well as suspend and resume support for a VM. * Version 4.3, released March 2011, brings support for the Intel® Itanium® Tukwila processor, an NVRAM Edit utility, a Virtual iLO Remote Console, 16 virtual CPUs for guests, 128GB for guest memory, 256 AVIO storage devices, the support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet, and the support of NFS backing stores. * Version 6.1, released March 2012 brings support for management of Hp vPar, Direct Input Output (DIO) feature for improved I/O functionality, manageability and performance. * Version 6.3, released March 2014 can emulate NVRAM, supports 32 CPUs and 256GB of RAM for VM guests, supports dynamic addition of I/O devices, and supports migration between i2 and i4 processors. * Version 6.3.5, released March 2015 enables dynamic deletion of I/O devices, improvements to what physical ports NPIV guests use after they're migrated, reduced memory overhead for large VMs, and more.

Capabilities

Exact specifications depend on the precise version and system configuration. * The host configurations are the same as those supported by

, and can include 128 physical cores and 1TB of main memory. * More than 250 guests can run concurrently, although the optimal number is generally lower, depending on host memory and processor configuration. * Guests can have multiple virtual CPUs, the maximum number in supported configurations being 4 with releases before 4.0, then 8 with release 4.0, 16 with release 4.3, and 32 with 6.3. * Guests can be configured with up to 256GB of memory in version 6.3. In recent releases, memory can be adjusted dynamically for HP-UX guests. * Virtual devices can be added or removed dynamically. The number of virtual devices allowed in supported configurations depends on the release. Versions after 4.3 support up to 256 when accelerated virtual I/Os are used. * The CPU allocation for virtual machines can be adjusted dynamically with a granularity of 1% or 1 MHz. CPU time is allocated by a fair-share scheduler, which delivers better CPU utilization for SMP guests than a more simplistic gang scheduler.

User interface

Integrity Virtual Machines can be created and managed using a

command-line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

or a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

accessed using a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. Essential commands include: * hpvmcreate to create virtual machines * hpvmstatus to display status information * hpvmstart and hpvmstop to start and stop virtual machines * hpvmmodify to modify existing virtual machines * hpvmconsole to simulate a hardware console * hpvmmigrate to perform on-line or off-line guest migration * hpvmsar to show performance information about the running guests. * hpvmsuspend and hpvmresume to suspend and resume virtual machines The user interface is integrated in the HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager.HP Integrity Virtual Machines Manager
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References

External links

Product description
at

Architecture overview
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White papers on HPVM

Release note for version 4.3
Virtualization software

Integrity Virtual Machines Integrity Virtual Machines is software from Hewlett-Packard that allows multiple virtual machines to run concurrently on any Itanium server running HP-UX, notably the HPE Integrity Servers line. It is part of HP's Virtual Server Environment suite ...

Unix software

History

Capabilities

User interface

See also

References

External links