HP has announced software aimed at helping IT managers to manage physical and virtual servers as if they were the same.
As well as this latest software, a number of other announcements were made at HP's Tech@Work conference and exhibition in Barcelona. All of the announcements were of features aimed at helping IT departments to better manage their software assets but, while most of them centered on enhancements, the virtualisation software was the only new product.
HP Insight Dynamics VSE allows IT departments to manage both physical and virtual servers as if they are the same. This capability gives managers far more flexibility in the way they deploy their servers. IT systems that mirror the physical work are restricted by the limitations on physical systems, whereas virtual systems have no such constraints.
A key part of the software is the ability to detach a physical or virtual server into one "logical server". By detaching the logical identity from the physical server, servers can be provisioned quickly and easily, and moved around the company's infrastructure regardless of whether they are physical or virtual servers.
The HP Insight Dynamics VSE software will be available in the second quarter -- between April and June -- of this year, said HP, and pricing has yet to be fixed.
HP Insight Dynamics VSE provides a single screen view of all the available assets, including the virtual and physical resources and hypervisors from multiple vendors, although only support for VMware is offered immediately. A HP executive said that support for other hypervisors would follow soon after the launch.
According to HP, the software allows managers to see the "big picture" of an organisation's assets and then drill down to see individual components without having to switch between screens.
HP Insight Dynamics VSE also offers a real-time capacity planning tool for IT managers to analyse server capacity and power usage based on historical information that has been gathered by HP at its HP Labs facilities. According to the company, this will help IT managers to "eliminate guesswork", allowing IT managers to "confidently predict infrastructure requirements".
According to Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser at Illuminata: "HP Insight Dynamics VSE is at the forefront of a new class of management software built to manage a thoroughly virtualised world."
