HP BL260c Delivering an Adaptive Infrastructure with the HP BladeSystem c-Clas - Page 6

and vice-versa. Server virtualization in this context refers to the broad set of technologies that abstract an entire physical server and allow its resources to be pooled and shared. Dynamic behavior and optimization Customers in large environments of enterprise data centers or hosting providers may need to address the dimension of dynamic behavior. The goal of a dynamic infrastructure includes the ability to change configurations, connections, and functions of infrastructure elements over time. This dynamic behavior could be in response to a single exception condition or planned events such as optimizing for throughput or energy consumption. The capabilities in this layer typically require more software content than the capabilities in the foundational layer, and require more integration between the disciplines of server, storage, and network engineering/management. Server, storage, and networking hardware should be engineered with the end state of a dynamic infrastructure in mind. The physical elements should increasingly incorporate technologies to facilitate isolation, modularity, and increased resilience where appropriate. To change configurations and infrastructure elements dynamically, the data center must have capabilities for: • Collecting discovery and state information • Managing virtual and physical resources • Isolating and encapsulating resources • Analyzing and optimizing resources • Automation • Resilience and availability Discovery and state information Administrators need to be able to collect information about the infrastructure elements, their state, and their relationships before they can intelligently manage the infrastructure. While much of this information is included within foundational management capabilities, additional information- particularly resource trend information and information about the interrelationships among the elements-is unique to dynamic control behavior. Managing virtual and physical resources Historically, virtual and physical resources have been parallel constructs, using different management tools that behave differently and show disjointed views of the data center elements. Converging the behavior and management of virtual and physical resources is critical in implementing a dynamic data center infrastructure. In an ideal world, virtual and physical servers would be viewed as equivalent objects, with identical behavior, as would virtualized storage pools and network resources. Administrators should have design tools that allow a complex infrastructure of virtual and physical devices to be composed into "templates" and then assembled into specific solutions. While energy-aware optimization for workload placement on both physical and virtual machines is a reality today, work is needed on integrating workload and placement awareness into the entire chain of data center power and cooling operations. This is a longer-term solution that will probably be available within several years. Isolation and encapsulation Isolation and encapsulation have been fundamental underpinnings of software architecture for several decades, but remain elusive in the realm of physical infrastructure. An ideal architecture could encapsulate selected regions of the infrastructure so that changes were isolated and encapsulated- essentially masking changes in one domain from the rest of the environment. For example, while 6