• Location-Language menuUnited States-English

Large Enterprise Business

Real Story about HP's Virtualization Leadership

March 2009 - Virtualization helps your organization pool and share IT resources in a way that reduces costs, makes your IT infrastructures more flexible and helps you respond quickly to changing business requirements. One of the keys to a successful virtualization strategy is a modular infrastructure, and an integrated management platform for both physical and virtual resources, one that can tell you where to optimally place those resources.


HP is a virtualization leader, consider the facts.

Fact 1: HP leads with first-to-market virtualization innovations.

• Automated, goal-based workload management for UNIX (2000)
• Electrically isolated hard partitions (nPars) and soft partitions (vPars) (2001)
• HP Virtual Server Environment – Integrated partitioning, high availability, utility pricing and automated workload management (2003)
• HP Integrity Capacity Advisor- Automated capacity planning for virtualized environments (2005)
• HP Virtual Connect (2006) and HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (2007)
• HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 (2008) (first interconnect that flexibly allocates the bandwidth of a 10 Gb Ethernet network port across four NIC connections)
• HP Insight Dynamics – VSE for ProLiant- advanced infrastructure management with integrated real-time capacity planning (2008)
• HP Insight Orchestration for automated infrastructure design and provisioning (2009) and Insight Recovery for cost-effective, push button disaster recovery for physical and virtual resources (2009)

Fact 2: HP is a global leader virtualization solutions based on VMware.

• HP has more server models certified for VMware ESX 3.5 than any other vendor.¹
• HP has the most certified storage systems on any VMware partner.
• HP has more VMware certified professionals (VCPs) than anyone except VMware
• HP is the first VMware authorized training center to train more than 10,000 students on VMware certification curriculum
• HP’s EDS manages over 30,000 virtual servers for more than 100 clients
• HP’s EDS is an official VMware global systems integrator

Fact 3: HP Insight software complements VMware by offering infrastructure management from one environment, from top to bottom, with in-depth knowledge about the hardware and power, precise control, and ongoing optimization for physical and virtual.

• HP Insight software works in conjunction with vCenter to manage both physical and virtual in the same way, including design, auto-provisioning, ongoing optimization for capacity and power, advanced visualization, and recovery.
• Not all customers want to give vCenter access to all server administrators – HP Insight software provides server administrators virtual machine (VM) administration capabilities in a controlled fashion.
• Customers are exploring adding Microsoft® Hyper-V to their environment and are looking for tools that manage heterogeneous virtual environments.
• While vCenter cannot deliver the flexibility of virtualization for physical environments, HP Insight software can – through easy workload movement of physical blade workloads or virtual-to-ProLiant (V2P) and physical-to-ProLiant (P2P) server migration capabilities.
• HP Insight software offers advanced control of power – not only reducing, but also reclaiming power with HP’s dynamic power capping capabilities.
• HP Insight software offers increased high availability by integrating prefailure alerts with vCenter to evacuate VMs before failure.

Fact 4: The latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker reports that HP is #1 for the number of new server shipments virtualized for the 3rd Quarter of 2008.²

Fact 5: HP servers have demonstrated industry leading performance on the VMmark³ benchmark that measures the performance of systems running VMware.

Submitter	System Description	VMmark Version & Score	Processors	Published Date
HP	HP ProLiant DL585G5 VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	VMmark v1.1 20.43@14 tiles View Disclosure	4 sockets16 total cores 16 total threads	01/27/09
Dell	Dell PowerEdge R905 VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	VMmark v1.1 20.35@14 tiles View Disclosure	4 sockets 16 total cores 16 total threads	11/12/08
IBM	IBM Bladecenter LS42 VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	VMmark v1.1 19.17@14 tiles View Disclosure	4 sockets 16 total cores 16 total threads	01/13/09

Submitter	System Description	VMmark Version & Score	Processors	Published Date
HP	HP ProLiant385G5p VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	VMmark v1.1 11.28@8 tiles View Disclosure	2 sockets 8 total cores 8 total threads	12/30/08
Dell	Dell PowerEdge R805 VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	VMmark v1.1 11.22@8 tiles View Disclosure	2 sockets 8 total cores 8 total threads	11/12/08
IBM	IBM System x3650 VMware ESX v3.5.0 Update 1	VMmark v1.1 8.63@6 tiles View Disclosure	2 sockets 8 total cores 8 total threads	09/02/08

Fact 6: HP sees continued strong momentum for virtualization adoption on HP Integrity servers:

• Nearly 80% of all soft partitioning units⁴ ship with the complete VSE suite
• Nearly 50% of all HP-UX 11i v3 shipments ship with the complete VSE suite

Fact 7: HP customers are reaping quantifiable benefits from virtualization today

• HP customers have achieved improved business outcomes, using HP virtualization solutions:
• Premera achieved four times faster times to deployment time for servers using HP Virtual Connect.
• Micros Fidelio has cut power and cooling cost by 80% and new staffing requirements by 50% while increasing data center activity by 50% per annum with an HP BladeSystem and Insight Dynamics – VSE solution.
• The University of Utah Health Care achieved a 15:1 consolidation ratio, consolidating 150 physical servers onto 10 HP ProLiant BladeSystem servers, delivering 346% ROI over three years.

¹ See: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf
² IDC WW Q308 Server Virtualization Tracker, January 2009
³ What VMmark measures
The VMmark benchmark is intended to measure the performance of virtualized servers on a system under test (SUT) so that customers can compare the capabilities of different platforms for virtualization. VMmark represents the performance of virtual machines within a server running VMware ESX and a set combination of operating systems and specially tuned applications reflecting a typical datacenter environment. VMmark uses a collection of ‘sub-tests’ derived from commonly used load-generation tools as well as from benchmarks developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC®). VMmark is an open standards effort that is agnostic toward hardware platforms and different virtualization software systems. VMmark uses workloads that represent common applications in datacenters. It is important to note that VMmark is designed to benchmark the performance of the virtualization software and the hardware, and is not designed as a benchmark of any other software component.
VMware® VMmark™ is a product of VMware, Inc. VMmark utilizes SPECjbb2005® and SPECweb2005®, which are available from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).
⁴ Soft partitioning units are defined as standalone vPar units, Integrity VM units as well as vPars or Integrity VMs shipped bundled with VSE suite, VSE OE, or DC OE.