As stated in this press conference, HP has launched a project called “Odissey” that will probably be a complete game changer in the x86 industry.

So far, only HP-UX could be run on a Superdome, but now, customers will have the capability of running HP-UX as well as Linux in the same Superdome server. The lowest-level virtualization layer of the Superdome is the nPar (node partition) and is an electrically-isolated group of Superdome cells (the picture on the right shows the SD2 enclosure populated with cell blades). As nPars are electrically isolated from each other, it will be possible to have nPars equipped with Xeon CPUs and other nPars with Itanium CPUs. Just as the first generation of Superdomes could run PA-RISC and Itanium processors in different nPars in the same server. A mix of CPUs types or families will not be possible.

Of course, the HP-UX cell blade will need Itanium CPUs and the Linux cell blade will need Xeon CPUs (as Linux is not supported on the latest Itanium-based servers), however, this opens the door to bringing Linux to new levels of availability, making use, for example, of the highly available crossbar of the Superdome 2 that routes all IO signals from the IO extenders, which contain the PCI-e cards, to the cell blades. This crossbar is able to retry all possible transactions and to reroute signals to make sure that every IO is performed accurately.

HP-UX will not be ported under under x86 and it will continue to run on the Integrity blades, rx2800 i2 rack-mount servers, as well as on the Superdome cells with Itanium CPUs. Also, this integration will only be for Intel Xeon processors, not AMD Opterons. The development of HP-UX will continue, as the Itanium roadmap still has two CPUs codenamed “Poulson” and “Kittson” to be delivered in the future.

It would be possible to run Linux (with the current Xeon CPUs – the number of cores of Intel’s next platform, codenamed Sandy bridge, for servers is not clear as of now) on 32 sockets, or 320 cores, or 640 threads !! That is huge and great news for all the customers who wanted to switch smoothly from Unix to Linux, or needed scale-up servers going beyond the 8 sockets provided by most of the vendors.

Also, the Integrity blades, which were very modular (they could be extended from two sockets to four sockets and even to eight sockets by just combining blades together and linking them with a blade link pictured below), will also be made available for Xeon processors.

The new servers (Superdome 2 and scalable blades) are planned for 2013.

Finally, HP announced that the Linux HA portfolio would be similar to the HP-UX one, which means that ServiceGuard for Linux (that was stopped two years ago) will be reactivated.

I think that all these announcements are great news for Linux customers who wanted to push their Linux infrastructures to mission-critical levels. Although HP-UX still has a clear roadmap, the attractiveness of the Xeon processor with Linux on such a scalable and available platform will be very strong.

This offer could also be interesting for customers of other commercial Unix versions by offering amazing scale-up capabilities for Linux on the x86 platform, which is the most open one.

In a long article, Kramer and Porter assert that companies are perceived to be prospering at the expense of the communities. I came to the same conclusion when thinking about an expression of popular culture: TV series. As a child, I used to watch TV series, such as Knight Rider or Airwolf, where private companies or foundations helped fight organized crime and bring justice.
Looking at TV series of today, the contrast is striking. Prison Break or Heroes both stage corporations, which are called “The Company”, probably in order to make them even more impersonal. In their respective series, these companies are instigators of conspiracies and use treason, murder and crime to reach there presumably business objectives.

This expression of the popular culture demonstrates the current perception of companies in communities : ruthless managers will do whatever it takes to optimize short-term financial results at the expense of the rest of the world.

Companies, under customer or regulatory pressure, try to correct this image through periodic social actions. However, according to Kramer and Porter, creating shared value (for both society and corporations) should not be put at the margin of the business model, but at the core.
An interesting example to me was the quarterly earnings calls of a tech company I have invested in. The top managers spoke for one and a half hour about financial results, goals and business  initiatives, until the VP of corporate responsibility had a meager fifteen minutes time slot to present all charitable actions undertaken by the company. Charitable actions are laudable. However, it really gave me the feeling that  making profit while doing something good for communities was an indirect result through the product and services sold but it was not at the core of this company’s business.

I think Kramer and Porter are on the right track and I think Free Software businesses are a great example of creating shared value. Companies, such as Red Hat, Talend, or Pentaho embody the principles of shared value by making billions of US dollars of revenue and supporting communities worldwide. Distributing software under, for instance, the General Public License, these businesses charge neither companies nor consumers for the use of their products, but rather for support, consulting and services. Moreover, they provide the source-code (the instructions that make the programs work) for study or modification purposes.

The authors of the article state that shared value should be created in three ways:

- reconceiving products and markets
The products creating shared value should serve disadvantaged communities, providing products to lower-income homes. The beauty of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) is that it can be distributed at no charge. Anyone can install and use a zero-cost operating system and applications, provided by company-sponsored initiatives, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Of course, communities still need to invest in hardware, but open-source software can be used by poor people in developed countries, as well as by users anywhere in developing countries, thus providing cutting-edge technology (such as virtualization) at no cost.
Moreover, the open-source licenses make it very easy to adapt the products to the needs of users, reusing components already developed by other projects.

- redefining productivity in the value chain
Many of Kramer and Porter’s elements that participate to the value creation, such as “energy use and logistics”, “procurement”, etc. do not apply directly to the production of software products, let alone FOSS.

However, the development of a project, such as the Linux kernel, is a collaborative approach. Anyone can participate and send patches to correct bugs in the program or launch a new module. Companies relying on such community projects and benefiting from the huge manpower provided by these communities cannot take total control of them. Though they can influence them by offering more technological support, they have to take in account the will and motivation of the community to make sure they still benefit from it. They have to balance between their agenda and the motivation of the community. This, to me, is creating shared value.

An example of a bad approach is the OpenSolaris project. After Sun Microsystems had opened and backed OpenSolaris for years as an open-source Unix operating system project, Oracle, which bought Sun, decided to close completely the development process, thus chasing any goodwill to contribute to the project. Although OpenSolaris is still open-source software, Oracle does not allow any change from non-Oracle developers. They do not open their development process and hence do not contribute to any community.

This combination of working for a company and for the community makes me think that employees working for companies selling solutions around Free Software certainly have a sense of working on something greater than just their own business. By helping produce software that can be used to the benefit of anyone around the world, they have a feeling of fulfillment, contributing to the global enhancement of societies.

- building supportive industry clusters
This point is, in my opinion, less relevant to Free Software. The reason for that is that anyone who has a decent Internet connexion can get access to all the FOSS knowledge (by downloading the source code of the programs) and also participate to the process of improving the products by sending improvement suggestions. Obviously, this can be done worldwide – the only prerequisite being a sufficient Internet infrastructure and working computer hardware. The work of NGOs, such as Linux4Afrika may help accelerate the penetration of the market in developing countries by providing support and by teaching classes. Nonetheless, Kramer and Porter name the North Carolina research triangle as an example of a successful cluster. Interestingly, it is where Red Hat’s worldwide headquarters are located.

The HBR article concluded that companies creating shared value would be the ones “unlocking the next wave of innovation and growth”.
I believe companies working in the FOSS ecosystem definitely create shared value. By giving their software for free, these companies make it accessible to all. By using processes based on the Internet, they make it possible for virtually anyone connected to the Internet to participate in their development and support communities. And finally, by publishing the source code, they allow anyone to take a look at how cutting-edge software is written and learn from it.

The current financial success of Free software companies is a proof that their business model is a sustainable success.

I have never been too impressed with what Ubuntu came witch, such as the Ubuntu netbook edition, although it did the job for the HP mini I had. Granted that I never tried Ubuntu Unity, but even so, I wanted to stick with Fedora and Gnome…

But then came Gnome3, the new version of this Linux desktop.
It is not that I dislike the new Gnome shell. It is very pretty, actually. The problem to me is that, although it is pretty, unlike, for example Apple products, the Gnome developers and designers could not bring two more factors in the equation : the intuitiveness and my desktop production style -which I am sure I share with quite a few people-. I am certainly no Apple fan, quite the contrary, actually, but I really missed here something not only beautiful and user-friendly, but also productive.

I need different fixed desktops for my music, to browse the web, to work on documents and to read my emails. This was simply not possible with Gnome, since the desktops automatically close when they are empty, changing their order. There is probably a way to fix that, but this was not the sole issue…

One more thing is that the 3D effects were far too slow to be usable. After having opened the fourth application, my desktop, that works like a charm under Gnome2 and KDE, became really too slow. Not an option for me.

The last thing that finished convincing me to switch to KDE was the wireless device that worked on the LiveCD but not after being installed. That really upset me, especially given that it works well under KDE (hence not a Linux kernel problem).

For these three reasons : because it is not sufficiently intuitive, because it is too slow, and because I did not want to lose 20 hours fixing a wifi stick that would work on another desktop, I switched to KDE.

I really think that the new Gnome shell is pretty and has value for some users, but not enough for me. That is something I love about Free Software : you don’t like what you have ? Then switch to something else ! Competition is definitely good for everybody…

I think it is important to give back, at least a little bit, to the community. I use Linux for 8+ years now and this would have never been possible without the time and effort put by the volunteers in the various projects of the Linux ecosystem. My way of thanking them is to get involved myself and help spread Free software.

Beyond the translation, I also intend to get more involved in the Fedora community in the future…

[herve@netbook2 ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/luks-6f51b932-7e77-4922-a484-ec2d25fbcff4
2.9G  2.4G  518M 83% /
tmpfs                 497M  456K  497M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   64M  396M  14% /boot
/dev/mapper/luks-27f1ea87-e3f1-4b8e-9cc5-50c543d5601c
20G  5.3G   13G  29% /home
/dev/mapper/luks-3fe2459e-5b8f-4c28-ae14-8e234a66d774
4.9G  138M  4.5G   3% /opt
/dev/mapper/luks-7cae3953-7d7d-4faa-a684-232f050287f6
1006M  100M  856M  11% /tmp
/dev/mapper/luks-1f05825f-bc91-4a53-9194-7e6ae271fa59
15G  2.4G   12G  18% /usr

To increase the logical volume, I use the traditional lvextend

[root@netbook2 herve]# lvextend -L 4G /dev/mapper/vg_netbook-LogVol00
Extending logical volume LogVol00 to 4.00 GiB
Logical volume LogVol00 successfully resized

I see here that the (long) device mapper file is a soft link that points to a file that is much easier to use

[root@netbook2 herve]# ll /dev/mapper/luks-6f51b932-7e77-4922-a484-ec2d25fbcff4
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 Mar  6 08:51 /dev/mapper/luks-6f51b932-7e77-4922-a484-ec2d25fbcff4 -> ../dm-3

The cryptsetup then resizes the encrypted logical volume

[root@netbook2 herve]# cryptsetup resize /dev/dm-3

And finally I can increase the filesystem

[root@netbook2 herve]# resize2fs /dev/dm-3
resize2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem at /dev/dem-3 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/dm-3 to 1048071 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/dm-3 is now 1048071 blocks long.

Checking if everything went well (in bold, the size has increased):

[root@netbook2 herve]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/luks-6f51b932-7e77-4922-a484-ec2d25fbcff4
4.0G  2.4G  1.6G 60% /
tmpfs                 497M  456K  497M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   64M  396M  14% /boot
/dev/mapper/luks-27f1ea87-e3f1-4b8e-9cc5-50c543d5601c
20G  5.3G   13G  29% /home
/dev/mapper/luks-3fe2459e-5b8f-4c28-ae14-8e234a66d774
4.9G  138M  4.5G   3% /opt
/dev/mapper/luks-7cae3953-7d7d-4faa-a684-232f050287f6
1006M  100M  856M  11% /tmp
/dev/mapper/luks-1f05825f-bc91-4a53-9194-7e6ae271fa59
15G  2.4G   12G  18% /usr

This Google Summer of Code project written in Python allows to execute a SSH command, to copy files, to rsync directories and to kill processes (among others) on multiple hosts

The install

First download the .tar.gz document
# wget http://parallel-ssh.googlecode.com/files/pssh-2.2.2.tar.gz

untar it
# tar -xzvf pssh-2.2.2.tar.gz
# cd pssh-2.2.2

To install (you need Python, it worked on RHEL 5.3):
# python setup.py install

The configuration

Then to execute parallel commands, create a file with all IP/hostnames you
need (one per line) like this
# cat hosts.txt
192.168.10.1
192.168.10.2

Create the directories “stderr” and “stdout”
# mkdir /tmp/stderr
# mkdir /tmp/stdout

and that’s it !

How to use it ?

If you want to execute the command hostname ?
# pssh -A -e errors -o /tmp/stdout -e /tmp/stderr -h hosts.txt -l root hostname

-A will ask the root password inline
-o will put the standard output in one file per host in the directory /tmp/stdout
-e will put the standard errors in one file per host in the directory /tmp/stderr
-l is the user that will execute the command

For my benchmark I nedded to change the starting script run.sh, so I edited it on one virtual machine and then used pscp to copy it on all the nodes in the directory /root/java/
# pscp -A -h hosts.txt -l root /root/java/run.sh /root/java/

And finally I executed the benchmark on my 32 nodes
# pssh -A -e errors -o results -h hosts.txt -l root /root/java/run.sh

Have you forgotten one JVM garbage collection parameter ? No worries, pnuke will make sure that all java processes are stopped on all servers
# pnuke -A -h hosts.txt -l root java

CloudSystem Matrix is a private cloud solution that aims at speeding the deployment of applications through highly automated technologies and integrated processes.

After we have created and published our cloud map, we have provided our business users all the information they need in order to deploy the application they require to execute their company’s strategy.

In order to do so, the user logs in to the self-service portal.

As you can see, the home page shows which resources are put at disposal to the user, as well as the current service consumption. We see that five physical servers, out of the six at disposal, as well as two virtual machine hosts are in use as part of a service deployed by the CloudSystem Matrix. By clicking on the “Templates” tab, we can access the list of templates which are published and which the user has the right to deploy. Remember the SAP 2-tier template we created in the first part? We have published it, hence we find it back here. That the user has created the template or not, doesn’t play a role as long as he has the right to use it.

By clicking on the template, the business user can display the details of the service: the layout of the network, the price, as well as the notes entered by the creator of the template, etc. In order to deploy the service automatically, he will click on the button ‘Create service’.

The user now has to enter a service name (for instance “SAP 2-tier John Smith”), the hostname completion (remember the need for a hash sign in the first post ?), an email -to contact the service requestor-, a start date and hour at which the service will be deployed, an end-date, at which the service will be rolled back, and finally, a pool of resources, from which the resources, such as servers, storage and networking, will be picked from. Final step: he clicks on “Submit”, and here we go !

The request is sent and the activity which is happening behind the scenes is displayed: the resources are reserved from the pool of resources. The software makes sure that the pool can accommodate the need indicated in the template. We can see here that four servers, four IP addresses, three networks and four boot disks are requested. CloudSystem Matrix will pick from the pool of resources the servers that meet at least the requirements of the template and will pick from storage disks (LUNs) that are already presented to WWN (worldwide names) and also meet the size indicated.

We see here that CloudSystem Matrix also integrates nicely into the user’s processes: the request above is paused, because an administrator (or an IT manager or anyone else who should take this decision) must give his approval, so that the deployment can continue. A Request for Change (RFC) could also be triggered at this point in time with tools such as HP Service Manager or BMC’s remedy. The teams using these tools will just have to accept the request and the deployment will go on.

We see here that the administrator granted the authorization to deploy this service and that the allocation process has started. The requested resources are then provisionned. The physical servers are reserved and a custom HP Virtual Connect profile is applied to them. This means that we are applying one ore more MAC addresses for the network, which will be connected to the VLANs we need, as well as one or more WWN for the storage, to which disks are already presented. The zoning of the storage was already prepared, so that after the WWN is attributed to the server, it can install the operating system as well as the application straight after the VC profile was attributed.

Taking a look at the Onboard Administrator, the HP BladeSystem enclosure management processor, the server loses the “i“-icon, which means that the server has now a Virtual Connect profile

On the screenshot above, we can see “Provisioning the logical server” (either physical or virtual) and, finally, “Activating logical server”: the ProLiant or Integrity server is now starting.

If VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines were to be deployed, CloudSystem Matrix would pick the right template, clone it, provision it, and finally adapt it according to the needs of the cloud map. If HP Integrity Virtual Machine were deployed, the host would be contacted vis SSH, it would create the VM and deploy it with Ignite UX either through normal package deployment, or via a golden image, a concept similar to the VMware/Hyper-V template.

We see above that the Integrity server starts, it then boots from the network (since the disks we have presented are empty) and that Ignite UX detects a deployment request from the client.

All the deployments methods (Ignite-UX,  HP RDP, HP Server Automation, etc.) and CloudSystem Matrix can communicate with each other: the deployment server confirms to the Matrix operating environment that the deployment request of a given client was received. This is acknowledged by the management server which indicates it to the user.

Finally, after the operating system is deployed, the application is installed through the execution of a workflow (it will be the subject of another blog post in the future).

Although I discussed the technical details of what happens behind the scenes, the business users, when they make a request, can see a completely abstract high-level view of what is going on. They don’t need to know the details, they just want to know if the application was deployed.

On the picture above, the business user sees that everything went well and that his IT service is up and running. What could have taken so much time to deploy, lasted roughly one hour with HP CloudSystem Matrix.

Instead of taking months putting all the pieces together, CloudSystem Matrix orchestrates the provisioning of storage, server and networking, installs the operating system and deploys the application in an automated way, also integrating in the organizations’ processes.

It is a fantastic tool that was already embraced by customers to modernize their IT environments. I have personally helped some of them deploying this solution in their datacenters and they love it. Though it needs a good understanding of key HP technologies (HP BladeSystem, HP Virtual Connect, HP Systems Insight Manager, etc.), the HP services team take care of the deployment of the solution, and the complexity of the infrastructure is hidden to the business users.

In my third and last blog entry for this series, I will focus around managing the infrastructure to fill the different pool of resources and how to present them to the users.

During the last past years, the rise of Linux-based operating systems, mostly on x86 architectures, was spectacular, because distributions such as Red Hat were able to provide a lower-cost alternative in terms of acquisition. However, the vast majority of these decision-makers, who, besides, also embraced Linux in their datacenters, thinks that Unix-based operating systems still bring more value in the following categories:

- availibility

Indeed, when it comes to availability, Unices have an advantage. The maturity of the product is higher, but above all, the integration of the platform to the operating system and to the application give an indisputable advantage to RISC/EPIC-based servers. The clustering solution ServiceGuard, for instance is way ahead of what SuSE HA or the Red Hat Cluster Suite can dream to become in 2 years. Though it is possible to reach high levels of availability for the database stack on Linux with Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters), the management of the solution is quite tedious and its cost prohibitive.

- scalability

Clearly, the biggest deployments of very large databases or ERPs happen on Unix. However, Linux is catching up very fast. Red Hat 6 supports the 120 logical CPUs and 4TB of RAM of the brand new HP DL980 ! Especially when it comes to scalability with regards to virtualization for massive consolidation scenarios, Linux does an excellent job with the compelling argument of the full binary compatibility with the x86_64 architecture.

- ease of maintenance

The number of updates is far less frequent for Unix (at least for HP-UX that I know well) compared with Linux. Moreover, tools such as Dynamic Root Disk, which allows to relocate the operating system from the local disks to the SAN in one command line and one reboot, or to patch the OS on a mirror offline and to reduce the planned downtime to the reboot time, really increase the productivity of the admins. Once again, the tight integration of the operating system to the platform makes this happen.

- partitionning

The partitioning of the RISC-EPIC hardware platform is much more advanced. Because of the capabilities of their platform, x86-based servers rely mainly on hypervisor-based virtualization, whereas Unices offer both hard and soft partitions. Also, although IBM offers Linux on Power servers, most of the virtualization capabilities are only available for AIX, IBM’s Unix. Finally, Linux lacks the pay-per-use and workload management functions of Unices. cgroups implemented in RHEL6 are a beginning, but it still lags behind the HP SRP or Solaris Zones.

A personal note about the “Staffing and skills are not an issue”: my first system administration experience started with Linux and I learned HP-UX afterward. The main principles of *NIX, such as LVM, runlevels, init scripts, the Bash shell, etc. are the same and hence the lack of smart people able to learn a few more commands should never appear. The most important is to stay flexible and ready to learn new technologies !

To conclude, Unix is going to remain in the datacenters for long. Its stability, ease of maintenance and workload management ensure a great continuity in the IT service delivery. Though the number of Linux servers will continue to grow, driven by the increase in performance of the x86_64 platforms (and I am definitely fine with that !), HP-UX, AIX and Solaris (depending on Oracle’s good will) are here to stay…

famillemarcy@ubuntu-home:~$ lspci | grep Net
00:06.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

This chipset has a Linux kernel module driver “rt61pci”, but this one did not work. Though iwconfig recognized the chip and ifconfig -a showed the wireless interface wlan0, the following command

famillemarcy@ubuntu-home:~$ lshw -C network

showed the wireless device as disabled.

In order to let it work, I had to add the following parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst “pnpbios=off  acpi=force irqpoll”. Only after having added it and rebooted it could work.

famillemarcy@ubuntu-home:~$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep acpi
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=853d8b99-8986-4b81-a96d-a635356b0dd1 ro quiet splash pnpbios=off  acpi=force irqpoll

I hope this helps if you have this kind of chip !

When I ask my customers how long it takes them to deploy a complete IT service (i.e. architecture design, proof of concepts, physical reception of the servers, provisioning of the resources -such as storage and networking- install the operating system and configure the application) I generally hear answers going from a couple of weeks for small projects to months for more complex projects.

This is the main infrastructure issue the HP CloudSystem Matrix addresses. This Matrix is simply a complete solution made of hardware (c7000 blades enclosure and a wide choice of Intel Itanium-based Integrity or AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon based servers), software (the full stack of the so-called Insight Software Suite) and services (the HP services people come on site, install the hardware and software and customize the solution to adapt it to the customers’ needs and processes).

Instead of deploying applications the old way, HP Bladeystem Matrix really transforms the hardware in commodity hardware that can be used and reused by different services. It creates a shared-service infrastructure that can be divided in different pool of resources which users will pick in order to request a service to be deployed. We can call this a cloud infrastructure in a box, because the users request applications through a self-service portal and these applications are deployed automatically somewhere, on an highly scalable IT infrastructure the business user has no idea about – and that is not his job anyway !

To be concrete: everything starts with the Insight Orchestration Designer. In this web-based application, it is possible to create so-called “cloud maps”, or templates, which will contain all the important information to deploy IT services. Let’s say you want to deploy a SAP 2-tier infrastructure: you will need a database server and some application servers, all booting from the SAN for more flexibility, as well as some network connectivity, i.e. VLANs that will be help deploying the application and the operating system over the network through PXE-boot and also, most importantly, a network linking the application servers to the database server.

How long and in which time frame do you think your company will be able to deploy all these elements manually and individually ? If you think what you have today is not good enough, HP CloudSystem Matrix can help you.

You can create your own cloud map or pick the maps already available on the HP website. The advantage of these pre-prepared cloud maps ? They are designed according to the best practices from HP and the ISVs, such as Oracle, SAP or Red Hat, so you can be sure that you will have enough I/O resources, for instance, to accommodate the deployment of a database server.

On this example, you see the two deployment networks for PXE-boot (RDP for HP Rapid Deployment Pack for Linux on x86-64 and Ignite-UX for HP-UX). The elements, such as server groups or physical storage are picked from the top left corner, drag-and-dropped on the main surface and connected to each other. Creating such a cloud map is really easy, however, this is just a XML file, there is no on-the-fly deployment.

Then, each of the components, such as servers, storage or networking must be configured to enter the minimum requirements needed. At deployment time, the software will pick the elements from the pool of resources which meet at least these requirements. In the case below, we see that the database server will at least have two processor cores and 8GB of RAM.

Note also that you can enter the cost for physical and virtual servers, IP addresses and GB of storage. This helps give an idea of the cost of an IT service to business users. This cost can also be integrated into other applications through a REST API.

We then configure the two network interfaces defined for the HP-UX database server. The primary interface will be the one deploying the operating system (the Ignite-UX network). We then have the choice between a DHCP, static or “Automatic” IP address.

DHCP is the standard dynamic host configuration protocol and “static” will allocate a static IP address to the interface. The trade-off however, is that we won’t be able to re-use the cloud map into multiple services, since the IP address will already be taken.
The field “Automatic” resolves this problem in that the management software will take an IP address from a pre-defined range and will allocate it as a static IP address for the duration of the service. The server, when it restarts, for instance, will keep the same static IP address. When the service is erased, the “Automatic” IP address will be sent back to the pool and can be reused for other services.

Finally, the hostname must contain a hash (#) sign. The reason is that, again, this template can be deployed multiple times and the hostnames need to be different at every deployment. At deployment time, the #-sign will be replaced by a completion string given by the service requester.

We now have to select the operating system that will run on the selected server. In our case, we use HP-UX 11i v3. The x86_64 servers can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows. Virtual machines running on the top of VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V can also be included in these cloud maps and be provisioned and deployed automatically.

After the main characteristics of the server were defined, we can now make use of the workflows to finish the cloud map. In our case, the workflow “SAPInstall” will be executed at the end of the creation of the service. This means that the SAP instance will be deployed on our newly provisioned infrastructure.This technology is based on HP Operations Orchestration and allows to customize the deployment of the service down to the smallest detail (e.g. change of a kernel parameter,etc.)

At that point in time, it is possible to create your own workflows, such as an integration with HP’s Universal CMDB to update it with the service, or open an new Request for change (RfC) in HP Service Manager or with BMC’s Remedy. The customers can hence integrate the deployment of their services in their already existing ITIL change processes.

Our cloud map is now ready to be deployed. The logo next to “validation status” is now green, which means that we have enough informations to deploy this service. We now save it and tick the box “Published”, so that business users will be able to select this cloud map from their service catalogue and request it to be deployed automatically.

The creation of a cloud map was an easy thing. Remember, though, that HP, in co-operation with ISV’s provide cloud maps ready to be deployed. In my next post, I will show you how to request a service to be deployed and what happens behind the scenes. Stay tuned !