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…

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 !

HP-UX is one of the few remainig commercial Unices out there. Today, only 3 play a significant role on the enterprise OS market : IBM AIX, running on Power processors, SUN Solaris, running on SPARC and x86 processors and HP-UX, running today on Intel Itanium-based servers. The latter used to run on HP’s own processors PA-RISC (for Precision Architecture) but after HP consolidated its portfolio on the only Itanium processors, it can only be purchased on IA64 processors.
HP-UX’s last version is HP-UX 11i v3, and this version has been enhanced and extended by three following updates.

File Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

HP-UX is a System V Unix. Let’s take a look at the root directory structure:

- /dev
This directory contains all device files, representing all devices attached to the system. Raw devices can be found under /dev/rdisk, block devices are in /dev/dsk and logical volumes are also placed in /dev

- /etc
As usual on Unix systems, all configuration files are stored in this directory.
All files controlling system startup and shutdown and daemons are located in /etc/rc.config.d. For instance, to configure your network interfaces for each boot and setup routes, you will edit the file /etc/rc.config.d/netconf and insert

INTERFACE_NAME[0]=lan0
IP_ADDRESS[0]=xx.xx.xx.xx
SUBNET_MASK[0]=xx.xx.xx.xx
BROADCAST_ADDRESS[0]=”"
INTERFACE_STATE[0]=”"
DHCP_ENABLE[0]=0
INTERFACE_MODULES[0]=”"

- /home
The usual home directory

- /sbin
The files located here are needed at boot time. The rc script that controls the the system startup is located in this directory as well as all runlevel dependent links to scripts respectively in /sbin/rc0.d/ , /sbin/rc1.d/ , etc. All available startup scripts are located in /sbin/init.d/

- /stand
The HP-UX kernel is kept in this directory. The kernel file is /stand/vmunix and the configuration file is /stand/system.

- /net
Reserved for remote file system mount points

- /opt
This directory is used to install applications on HP-UX. Each application has its own directory hierarchy. For the Apache Webserver, this will look like the following : /opt/hpws/ (for HP web services, the root directory, where Apache, Tomcat, and others are located) : /opt/hpws/apache/bin for executable binaries, /opt/hpws/apache/etc for the config files, and so on…

- /tmp
The temporary directory where anybody can create or delete files. Unlike Solaris, this directory is not flushed after reboot.

- /usr
Most HP-UX files are located here, especially user-relates commands, libraries, doc & manual pages and contributed software.
/usr/bin : user commands, applications and utilities.
/usr/include : include and header files for programming
/usr/lib : libraries for programming
/usr/sbin : many administration commands are located here
/usr/share/man : man pages

- /var
/var contains log files distributed across different directories:
/var/adm : system administration related programs (for instance /var/adm/sw for software installation/removal, /var/cron for cron log files, etc.)
/var/opt : application-related logs
/var/spool : print services related files

Virtualization

On the virtualization side, there are one feature shipped with any HP-UX instance : the Secure Resource Partitions (SRP) which are somehow similar to the Solaris zones.
You can assign particular resources to these partitions such as CPU shares, entire CPU’s (psets), memory as well as disk bandwith. Moreover, the security features of the SRP allow you to assign disk and network access to a particular partition. On the top of that, the SRP will make sur that your files (sockets, links, whatever…) cannot be accessed from outside the partition, unless a rule has been expressly defined in the config file. The SRP’s also use the capabilities of the role-based access control (RBAC) that allow a user to gain privileges to execute a single operation (e.g. a user can get privileges to mount a disk without having to be root). This allows the admin to define precise roles and increases the accountability of each user.

Beside the Base Operating Environment (BOE), which is shipped with any HP-UX, the user can also choose between the High Availibility OE and the Virtual Server Environment OE (or the Datacenter OE that contains everything).

With the VSE-OE, you have the choice between different virtualization types :
- nPars
nPars (for Node Partitions) are only available on mid-range and high-end cell-based servers. These cells consist of a kind of a plate on which CPUs and memory reside. Npars are just grouped cells that act as a single server.
- vPars
vPars (for Virtual Partitions) are more fine-grained: you can assign here resources on a per CPU basis. They run on HP-UX 11i v1, v2 and v3 only.
- Integrity Virtual Machines
The Integrity Virtual Machines are some kind of VMware-like virtual machines. They run on the top of a HP-UX guest that emulates the hardware and can paravirtualize the I/O drivers to accelerate the I/O throughput. Sysadmins create then virtual switches that can be internal or related to a physical interface to let the IVM communicate with the outside world. For network intensive workloads, you can assign an interface to a dedicated VM over a virtual switch to enhance performance. The last feature brought by the third update of HP-UX 11i v3 is the capability for IVM to migrate from one physical host to another (just like VMotion or Citrix XenMotion do).

Software and patch management

HP-UX’s software and patch management is based on Software Depot (SD-UX). Software packages are divided in different structures:

- Filesets: a collection of files
- Subproducts: group of filesets
- Products: examples are X11, Oracle, etc.
- Bundles: group of products
- Software depot: repository where software packages are made available for download and install on clients

Software depot can be used with an X or text-only interface, or for some tasks with the command line.

You can list the currently installed software on your system by entering the “swlist” command.
To install a new package, find out first on which server server has software depots. Then enter
# swlist -l depot @ hostname
to list all available depots on this server. Since you want to install a single package, enter
# swlist -d @ hostname:/path/to/the/depot
in order to list all applications and their description.
# swinstall -s hostname:/path/to/the/depot packagename
will then install the required software, resolving automatically the software dependencies.

Patches are managed in the same way and are also installed with the swinstall command.

Applications

HP-UX and the Integrity servers are designed for mission critical applications. Running an Apache server is possible, but it is not the kind of applications you will expect to see on such machines. Databases and Java application servers are rather the sweet spots of this OS.

A lot of commercial applications are available (to name a few : Oracle, Websphere, Weblogic,…) but MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and other Free Software are also ported and maintained on HP-UX.

The default shell is the Bourne shell, set in vi mode. Coming from a Linux/Bash world, it took me a little adaptation time.

Network

The network is managed with the tools lanscan (which will give information about the interfaces) and ifconfig (that will help configuring them). As we have seen it, the interfaces can be configured automatically at boot time in the file /etc/rc.config.d/netconf.

The domain names are resolved with the following files: /etc/hosts,  /etc/nsswitch.conf

Managing disks / SAN / Filesystems

The disks files are placed in the /dev/disks/ directory, the raw devices in /dev/rdisks/ . Note that you will only have one file to manage for a presented SAN LUN. The multipathing and failover are handled at the kernel level.

The most commonly used file system is onlineJFS, which is in fact a rebranded Veritas VxFS, and offers such features as online shrinking and extending of the filesystem and online refragmenting, which are much more reliable than, for instance, for ext3.

Resources : http://www.amazon.com/HP-Certified-HP-UX-System-Administration/dp/0130183741