HP today announced new virtualization software, including a tool for planning Sun migrations, and a partner program that are designed to help enterprises speed adoption of virtualization to deliver better business outcomes. The software – enhancements to the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for HP Integrity servers – optimizes server resource utilization by providing a pool of virtual servers that can grow or shrink based on business needs. A key component of HP’s Enterprise Storage and Server Software portfolio, the HP Virtual Server Environment and associated services allow customers to reduce costs and increase agility by simplifying planning, implementation and management in a virtualized IT environment. To assist customers in planning migrations and consolidations to HP Integrity servers, HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor can import data collected from Sun servers by HP Performance Agent. In addition, new trending capabilities for this intuitive tool let customers simulate future usage patterns when planning consolidations for HP-UX, Windows and Linux. Further enhancements to the HP VSE for HP-UX 11i help deliver better business outcomes by increasing customers’ ability to mitigate risk with intelligent control: * HP Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager enables customers to discover and view applications in a virtual server environment in just minutes; * HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager specifies which workloads can automatically access spare capacity, tightening financial controls while maintaining service levels of key applications; * HP Global Instant Capacity allows hardware usage rights to be transferred among systems to cost-effectively meet changing business demands and is automatically updated to transfer usage rights from offline servers in the case of a disaster. “One of the most important elements of HP’s Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity servers is that it provides the control needed to effectively manage virtualized Itanium environments,” said John Humphreys, program director, IDC. “These enhancements may further improve customer insight into their virtualized environments – as well as predict and plan for future workloads – helping to minimize disruption to the business.” Additionally, HP announced a new release of HP Serviceguard that expands high-availability options for customers running virtualization in a production environment. HP Serviceguard for Linux now brings high availability to Linux-based applications running in virtual machines for both VMware technology on HP ProLiant servers and HP Integrity Virtual Machines on HP Integrity servers. HP Partner Virtualization Program speeds virtualization adoption The new HP Partner Virtualization Program allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to build and verify applications in a secure, virtualized environment, while choosing from a broad selection of virtualization technologies, platforms and guest operating systems. Through online access to HP Partner Technology Access Centers, ISVs can rapidly test, verify and tune applications running on virtual machines. “The HP Partner Virtualization Program provides us with added flexibility to react to changing enterprise customer requirements for the open source JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite, our integrated product line,” said Mike Moody, vice president, Engineering, JasperSoft. “Remote access to virtualized servers allows us to quickly build, test and verify our solution on HP platforms providing our customers with confidence.” The HP Partner Virtualization Program allows ISVs to easily and automatically request and use HP ProLiant and HP Integrity servers to test applications running in a virtual environment using software from HP and partners such as VMware. ISVs can debug, port, verify and support applications running on a broad range of operating system deployments, such as HP-UX 11i, Microsoft Windows and Linux (Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux). ISVs can also publish their applications in an online catalog to enable customers to quickly and easily determine availability of tested solutions. The new program additionally affords ISVs unique access to open source and Linux virtualization, enabling open source community leaders to evaluate application strengths in heterogeneous environments. “This is another step in HP’s long history of delivering virtualization solutions that help businesses gain a competitive edge,” said Nick van der Zweep, director, Virtualization, HP. “HP’s holistic approach ensures that our customers can deploy and manage their environments with reduced risk to gain the full benefits of virtualization.” Virtualization is a key enabler of the HP Adaptive Infrastructure, which delivers the next-generation data center to optimize business outcomes. With these new additions to the powerful HP virtualization suite, the HP Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio helps customers accelerate the move from high-cost IT silos to low-cost, pooled IT assets in order to optimize their infrastructures to increase flexibility and improve quality of service that better serves business needs. More information about HP’s virtualization portfolio is available at www.hp.com/go/virtualization.