Part I of this post was about the virtualization market, part II about technical vision, part III is about an upcoming product. HP presented Insight Dynamics as their multi-hypervisor virtualization solution. A vendor specific management solution is not inherently exciting, what makes it interesting is how HP tries to counter the threat that VMware might further commoditize server hardware.
In terms of features, many starups have more to offer, but this is about the fight over control of the data center. Here are the differentiators that I could see.
- Multi-hypervisor support: HP-ID manages VMware, Xen and Hyper-V. Today it is only VMware that really matters, but the differentiation vs. VMware is evident. No differentiation vs. most startups.
- Hybrid management: HP-ID manages both VMs and physical servers and can handle V2P and P2V migration on the fly. This is actually fairly unique, and has created a huge draw among attendants of the forum.
- Deep hardware support: HP-ID supports HP blades and various server models at a level that vendor-neutral products will never reach.
From a technology perspective, it’s nothing too great, but operations people loved it for good reasons. While nobody is actually using Xen or Hyper-V, at least the latter is considered pretty much unavoidable. The HP lunch table on hybrid management was clearly beating all other topics. Next to nobody even dreams of a fully virtualized environment and there is clearly unmet demand for management software that crosses between virtual and physical. Practitioners uniformly praise the role of blade technology for dynamic data centers. One friendly user spoke about a standard rack that had only 12 cables running to the LAN and SAN switches; using standard 2U rack mounts the equivalent would be 120 cables. A factor ten is always cool and cabling is extremely manual and can be error prone depending on your setup.
The bottom-line: while technically a mostly unimpressive, hardware specific solution, HP-ID addresses the practical pain points.
Tags: Systems Management
