HP announces new offerings for VMware

Two of the announcements not getting much press from the floor of VMworld this week were announced during Paul Martiz keynote on day 1 by HP.  HTC is primarily an HP shop, so it looks like an area of interest for me and one that might be getting neglected elsewhere, so here goes some news coverage.

HP is busy working on new technology to integrate vCenter and the HP hardware giving administrators greater visiblity into the hardware state and ease of management from a central pane of glass. This software is part of the Insight Control suite of products which HP already produces.  The new plug-in will sit on a Virtual Center client and will talk directly to the ILO, OA, and other agents on HP hardware to report back things like temperature, processor state, memory errors, etc. into the vCenter console.  HP reps also told me that the software goes bidirectional and can send information from vCenter over into HP SIM.

Power control also gets integrated as we continue to see HP work on power management in its rack mount and blade enclosures.  Power and heat were major issues addressed with the C7000 chassis and the functionality is being extended into the view from vCenter.  Today, if you enabled VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) and it shuts down a host because the virtual machines are idle, HP SIM sees this as an error state and begins to alert administrators due to a failure of a host.  In the future, the two-way communication will allow for HP SIM to be smart enough to recognize that the host is offline due to DPM and not to a critical error.  We’ll gain insight (sorry, had to)  into vCenter from the HP tools.

HP also touted its new VDI hardware package which includes Proliant server along with a Lefthand SAN solution to provide for a very flexible, single-rack solution for deploying VDI.  The press release touts it as the first sub-$1000 per seat solution for deploying VDI.

For those who haven’t heard of HP’s Lefthand technology – Lefthand Networks was a start-up SAN provider who used commodity hardware to create iSCSI SANs with advanced snapshotting and replication features.  HP acquired this company last year and is steadily working to bring their iSCSI solution into their Storageworks lineup.  This solution seemed to use a purpose built Lefthand solution with what appeared to be a 3 to 5 U enclosure with two or three sliding shelves housing multiple mini SAS drives to accommodate terrabytes of data.  The disk enclosure shown during the presentation looked more like HP’s SFS enclosures than the Lefthand SAN offerings – the P4000, etc. – but we were told it was Lefthand powered.

For more information, see the original press release: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090901a.html

For information about the Insight Control for VMware, see: http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries.  Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.