1ST EDITION VIRTUALIZING HP-UX SERVERS AND APPLICATIONS

BRINGING NEW LIFE TO "CLASSIC" SYSTEMS

By Patrick Wallek

1ST EDITION

VIRTUALIZING HP-UX

SERVERS AND APPLICATIONS

1ST EDITION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introducton........................................................................................ 3

Customer Problems........................................................................ 4 Customer 1 Legacy Configuration......................................... 5

5 6

Test & Development Servers............................................ Production Servers..............................................................Totals...................................................................................... 6

Customer 2 Legacy Configuration......................................... 7 7 Servers & Storage...............................................................

Totals...................................................................................... 8

Solution.............................................................................................. 9 9 10 11

What are HP9000 Containers?............................................. Customer 1 Solution.................................................................. Customer 2 Solution.................................................................. Container Setup.......................................................................... 12

14 Conclusion .........................................................................................

Customer Feedback ........................................................................ 15

www.ServiceITDirect.com | 2

About the Author ............................................................................16About Service IT Direct..................................................................17

INTRODUCTION

STUCK ON "CLASSIC" PA-RISC SERVERS?We Get it!

If you’re like our other Clients, the frustration has set in. If this “classic” system goes down, your phone is going to ring non-stop, and its your job/company on the line. The business is dependent on the application running, but the hardware is another story. It’s aging! Parts availability is an issue, and there is a lack of internal expertise.

We’ve heard it all! Our Container solution gives our Client's peace of mind by modernizing their PA-RISC hardware while still running legacy versions of HP-UX due to database and application restrictions.

In this book you will see how we can help increase the reliability and performance of your "classic car"...I mean system.


Customer Problems: ervice IT Direct was approached by two customers asking for

a solution that would allow them to modernize their agingPA-RISC based hardware, running HP-UX, and storage environment. However, they still need to run legacy versions of the HP-UX operating system and their databases and applications currently in production. Some of the reasons given for this request were: age of the hardware; increasing number of service calls for the hardware; increasing cost of hardware maintenance; system and application performance, or lack thereof; lack of system redundancy; rack space usage; power inefficiency. Both customers also wanted redundancy built into the new solution. Part of their legacy systems and applications ran two manufacturing plants. If a system went down, then manufacturing was severely impacted.


Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) offers a product called HPE 9000 Containers. This product allows you to virtualize older, legacy, PA-RISC based HP-UX servers and their applications onto newer Itanium-based HP-UX servers. In this E-Book we will explore how Service IT Direct has used this product with two of its customers to increase their application performance and availability while decreasing rack space usage, power and cooling requirements, and maintenance costs.

S

• HP9000 A500- 2 x 550 MHz CPUs- 5 GB RAM- 140 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.11- Running custom legacy application

• HP9000 D390- 2 x 240 MHz CPUs- 1.5 GB RAM- 190 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 10.20- Running Oracle Applications 10.7

• HP9000 L1000- 2 x 360 MHz CPUs- 8 GB RAM- 3.5 TB Disk Space

• StorageTek disk array- HP-UX 11.00- Running Oracle 8i and 9i databases

• HP9000 L2000- 2 x 440 MHz CPUs- 2 GB RAM- 34 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.00- Running Oracle Web Forms & Reports

Test & Development Servers


Disk-to-disk hot backups of the Oracle databases were runnightly.

The database sizes, at the time these results were recorded, were:

PROD: 550 GB NV: 90 GB WIPROD: 75 GB WFCPROD: 25 GB

On the legacy physical systems, the backups ran in:

PROD: 5.1 hours NV: 1.3 hours WIPROD: 1 hour WFCPROD: 30 minutes

On the new containerized system, with new disk storage, the backups ran in:

PROD: 1.5 hours NV: 50 minutes WIPROD: 15 minutes WFCPROD: 10 minutes

These improvements in backup speed were very well received by the customer.

BACKUP RESULTS

Customer 1 | Legacy Configuration:

• HP9000 K580o - 6 x 240 MHz CPUso - 4 GB RAMo - 340 GB Disk Space▪ - 2 Fibre attached disk trays (JBOD)o - HP-UX 10.20o - Running Oracle Applications 10.7• HP9000 L1000o - 4 x 360 MHz CPUso - 1 GB RAMo - 314 GB Disk Spaceo - HP-UX 11.00o - Running Legacy HR applications• HP9000 L2000o - 2 x 440 MHz CPUso - 2 GB RAMo - 72 GB Disk Spaceo - HP-UX 11.00o - MicroFocus COBOL licensing Manager• HP9000 L2000o - 2 x 440 MHz CPUso - 6 GB RAMo - 72 GB Disk Spaceo - HP-UX 11.00o - Running Oracle Web Forms & Reports• HP9000 N4000o - 8 x 440 MHz CPUso - 16 GB RAMo - 4 TB Disk Space

- 10 Fibre attached disk trays (JBOD)- StorageTek Disk Array

- HP-UX 11.0- Running Oracle 8i & 9i databases

In order to establish some performance metrics for both the physical and containerized systems I ran a simple SQLPLUSselect statement against a database table with approximately 45 million records.

SQLPLUS statement: select count(*) from inv.mtl_material_transactions;

Physical system: Run 1: 14 min 43.75 sec Run 2: 15 min 7.05 sec

Containerized system: Run 1: 39.41 sec Run 2: 36.92 sec

CUSTOMER SQLPLUS QUERY RESULTS

Production Servers

Totals: • Servers – 9• RAM – 37.5 GB• Storage – 8.5 TB• Rack Units – 157 (approx. 3.5Racks)• Watts of Power – 29,300


• HP9000 D370- 2 x 160 MHz CPUs- 2 GB RAM- 220 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 10.20- General HP-UX test for legacy

applications• HP9000 K370

- 4 x 200 MHz CPUs- 4 GB RAM- 278 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 10.20- Running Oracle 7.3.4 databases

• HP9000 K370- 4 x 200 MHz CPUs- 4 GB RAM- 311 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 10.20- Running custom legacy applications

• HP9000 K570- 6 x 200 MHz CPUs- 4 GB RAM- 223 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 10.20- Running custom legacy applications

• HP9000 rp5450- 4 x 440 MHz CPUs- 8 GB RAM- 400 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.00- Running Oracle 8.1.7 databases


Oracle Applications is a major part of the customer’s business. Because of that it was important to establish that those jobs were running significantly faster as well.

Two typically long running jobs are “Load NV Item Costs” and “DPS Insert Usage”.

The run time of the “Load NV Item Costs” job was:

Physical: 1 hour Containerized: 15 min

The run time of the “DPS Insert Usage” job was:

Physical: 1 hour Containerized: 6 min

CUSTOMER ORACLE APPLICATIONS JOBS

Customer 2 | Legacy Configuration:

Servers and Storage

•• HP9000 rp5450

- 4 x 440 MHz CPUs- 8 GB RAM- 202 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.00- Running Oracle 7.3.4 databases

• HP9000 rp5450- 4 x 440 MHz CPUs- 8 GB RAM- 510 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.00- Running Oracle 8.1.7 databases

• HP9000 rp5450- 4 x 440 MHz CPUs- 16 GB RAM- 560 GB Disk Space- HP-UX 11.11- Running custom legacy applications

• Storage- LUNs presented from Hitachi disk

array

•••• Servers – 8• RAM – 54 GB• Storage – 2.7 TB• Rack Units – 102• Watts of Power – 17,600


Since Oracle Applications are such an important part of the customer’s business, it was important to verify that reports run through Oracle Applications were also performing better in the new containerized system.

The customer receives a report that details the number of report requests processed, the total run time, longest wait time and average wait time for the previous 24 hours.

Physical system: Total requests: 5,942 Total Run Time: 24.04 Hrs Avg. wait time: 1.06 Min Longest wait time: 87.58 Min

Containerized System: Total requests: 5,627 Total Run Time: 5.44 Hrs Avg. wait time: 0.76 Min Longest wait time: 21.02 Min

These were an impressive increase in performance.

CUSTOMER ORACLE APPLICATIONS REPORT

SERVER

Totals:

Servers and Storage

product developed by HPE called HPE 9000 Containers.

SOLUTION | HPE HP9000 CONTAINERS

T he solution we came up with for both customers was to utilize a

From the HPE 9000 Containers product page:

“HPE 9000 Containers is a set of tools designed to enable quick transition of application environment from an HPE 9000 server with PA-RISC processor to an HPE Integrity server. HPE 9000 Containers allows rehosting the complete HPE 9000 user-space environment without recompiling or reinstalling individual applications, or reconstructing the application ecosystem, with minimal reconfiguration and application inventory preparation effort.”

This is the key part of solution for both customers. This product gives you the ability to migrate HP-UX 10.20, 11.0, 11.11 and 11.23 workloads from PA-RISC based systems to a container on an Itanium based system running HP-UX 11.31. The container that is created, generally from an Ignite/UX backup of your legacy system, will be a near duplicate image of that system. Once both the HP-UX operating system and all your applications and data have been migrated to the container, everything should run normally. This is possible because all operating system libraries, application binaries and libraries, and application data all seem to still be running in an instance, the container, of the legacy version of the operating system. So, nothing seems to have changed as far as your applications are concerned. The container itself is running on the HP-UX 11.31 host system. The host is able to run these PA-RISC based systems because of a feature called Aries. Aries is, very basically, an emulator that runs PA-RISC based programs on an Itanium based system. This is what allows HP9000 Containers to function. the whale. However, if you feel confident in your story and do want to land a whale my recommendation is: ask for some help.



CUSTOMER 1 SOLUTION: nce it was determined that HP9000 Containers would work in the

• 3 x HPE rx2800 i4 servers each with- 8 Core 2.53 GHz CPU- 64 GB RAM- 2 x 10 Gb Ethernet adapters- 2 x 300 GB Internal disk drives (RAID 1 pair)- HP-UX 11.31 running on the internal drives as the container

host- 3 node HPE Serviceguard cluster

• HPE MSA 2040 disk array- 24 x 600 GB 15K RPM drives- Add-on DS2700 enclosure with 24 x 1.2 TB 10K RPM drive- 2 x iSCSI controllers

• 2 x Dell 24 port 10 Gb ethernet switches- Dedicated to iSCSI communication between the servers anddisk array

When configuring this solution, the intent was to have sufficient resources such that any container could run on any server at any time. The 3 node Serviceguard cluster is set up so that each individual container is a Serviceguard package. As such, each container can run on any of the 3 systems. The standard configuration assigns the production database container to one server, the rest of the production systems to a 2nd server, and the test / development systems to the 3rd server. It should be possible, if 2 out 3 servers fail, for all containers to run on a single server, though that would not necessarily be ideal from a performance perspective. This solution saved significant rack space and power consumption. There is a total of only 12 RU and 4,150 watts of power used. This is a savings of 145 RU (approx. 3.5 racks) and more than 25,000 watts.

O customer environments, we proceeded to build a solution around this technology for each customer.


CUSTOMER 2 SOLUTION: The solution we developed for the second customer consisted of:

• 2 x HPE rx2800 i2 servers each with- 4 Core 1.6 GHz CPU- 96 GB RAM- 2 x dual port 8 Gb Fibre cards- 2 x 300 GB Internal disk drives (RAID 1 pair)- HP-UX 11.31 running on the internal drives as the containerhost- 2 node HPE Serviceguard cluster

• HPE MSA 2040 disk array- 10 x 300 GB 15K RPM drives- 2 x Fibre Channel controllers disk array

When configuring this solution, the intent was to have enough resources so that any container could run on either server at any time. The 2 node Serviceguard cluster is set up so that each individual container is a Serviceguard package. As such, each container can run on either of the systems. The standard configuration assigns 4 containers to one server and the other 4 containers to the other server. If either server fails all 8 containers should be able to run on a single server, though that may not be ideal from a performance perspective.

This solution saved significantly on rack space used and power consumption. There is a total of only 6 RU and 2,800 watts of power used. This is a savings of 96 RU (approx. 2.25 racks) and more than 14,500 watts.

HP-UX CONTAINER SETUPSetting up HPE 9000 Containers is not necessarily difficult, but it can be time consuming depending on the amount of data you have to migrate from the physical system to the container. The HP 9000 Containers A.03.01 on HP Integrity Server Administration Guide HP-UX 11i v3 contains excellent step-by-step instructions for setting up a container. Each physical system for each customer was converted to a separate container. Once the base HP-UX operating system was running in a container, we migrated the data from the customers’ legacy storage to their new storage. After a period of testing to verify that all systems were performing as expected, a time was scheduled to migrate data to the containers again and move them into production. The basic steps taken for each customer were:

1) Purchase new hardware.2) Set up HP-UX 11i v3 / 11.31 on the new servers’ local disks.3) Install the HPE 9000 Containers software.4) Set up and install the new disk arrays.5) Create LUNs on the new disk arrays for each of the containers’operating system and data.6) Present LUNs to servers.7) Create volume groups and logical volumes as necessary and mount filesystems.8) Choose 1 server to act as initial set up server.9) Set up containers from an Ignite/UX image from the physical system(s)using temporary IP address(es).10) Migrate data from physical systems to containerized systems and test.



11) Set up Service Guard cluster and packages.12) Verify that each container can run on each node in the cluster.13) Once testing has completed and all is OK, schedule time to movecontainers into production.14) Migrate data to containers again.15) Shut down physical system(s).16) Change IP address(es) to production IP address(es).17) Verify containers are running normally and all apps work.

When I was working on these projects, each customer used different scheduling methods for migration, depending on the server’s function. The migration plans for both customers involved migrating some of the test / development servers during normal business hours during the work week. When it came to migrating production servers, Customer 1 requested that their 3 main servers be migrated over Memorial Day weekend. Customer 2 scheduled 1 or 2 servers each weekend for 3 or 4 weeks to migrate their production servers. Any migration to production is a matter of the amount of downtime that your business can withstand and figuring out how to schedule appropriately.

HP-UX CONTAINER SETUP | Cont.


CONCLUSIONThe HPE 9000 Containers has proven to be an excellent solution for these 2 customers.

Customer 1 migrated their main production systems over Memorial Day weekend in 2016. They have been running since then with no major issues.

Customer 2 migrated their system in the spring of 2017 and has been running with no major issues.

Each customer has seen, sometimes significant, performance improvements after migrating their legacy systems and applications to HPE 9000 Containers. Have a look at some of the results in the sidebars of this document for more details on those improvements. If you are looking for a solution that will allow you keep running your legacy HP-UX operating systems and the applications that they support, HPE 9000 Containers is worth your time to see if it will work for you.

If you would like more information about HPE 9000 Containers or wish to learn more about how it was implemented for these two customers, please

contact us.

888-596-4720 [email protected]

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

“From Manufacturing, the close reports ran in just over an hour, where they normally run in 5 hours. The plant was able to come out of "disaster recovery" mode (they have to manually record transactions until the point in time inventory reports are complete) and resume entry to Oracle much sooner, which always helps in data integrity.”

“From IT, our processes to update sales and inventory tables ran much quicker, and the final Inventory grading cube was complete before 5:00pm on Day 1. Finance uses these tables and cubes for analysis and to generate close JE's and are normally anxiously waiting for these processes to be complete.”

- CUSTOMER 1

“Our developers have stated they have seen signification improvement in query speed for their Oracle databases.”

“We are able to restart our containers in a matter of a minute rather than 25 minutes for the physical servers.”

“The ability to move containers between the compute nodes makes it much easier to recover from a server outage.”

- CUSTOMER 2


ABOUT SERVICE IT DIRECT

We’re Service IT Dicompany that holds the philosophy that our customers

rect, an IT equipment maintenance support

deserve high-quality service without the high costs that some companies attach to it.

Since 1989, Service IT Direct has been providing the best Mission Critical Data Center Support Services in the world. Service IT Direct successfully transitions clients from hardware/software support with tier one organizations such as EMC, IBM, HP, Oracle/Sun, Cisco, Dell, NetApp, Hitachi, and DEC. Our IT service deliverables far exceed the OEM’s standards and we are able to do it for less. Service IT Direct also provides extremely cost-effective upgrade solutions. Our IT procurement model is considered the most forward-thinking our industry has ever seen. We obtain the best possible pricing for our clients directly from the OEMs at prices beneath most reseller’s costs. If you expect the absolute lowest prices on your IT purchases, then you need to give us a call.

We also provide other key Data Center Professional Services like Managed Back Up Services, Disaster Recovery, System Administration, Data Center Relocations, IT Asset Disposition (ITAD), IT Asset Management (ITAM), installation / de-installation services, and a host of training offerings. We currently support 10% of the Fortune 100 and hundreds of other large Enterprise customers. Our tools, processes and people are of a standard that sets us apart from the competition.


O P T I O N : A

O P T I O N : CO P T I O N : B

My name is Patrick Wallek, I joined Service IT Direct in May 2011 as a Critical Systems Software Engineer with the primary responsibility of supporting the HP-UX operating system for Service IT Direct customers. I have more than 25 years of experience in the IT Field. I was first exposed to HP-UX in 1992 and started working as a full-time HP-UX Systems Administrator in 1998. I am experienced in HP-UX versions 10.20, 11.0, 11.11 (11i v1), 11.23 (11i v2) and 11.31 (11i v3). I am a frequent contributor to the HP Enterprise Business Community Forums (formerly the ITRC Forums) and I am currently ranked 7th all-time in the overall forums and 5th all-time in the HP-UX category.

Certifications:

HP-UX Certified Systems Engineer (CSE) - HP-UX 11i v3 - Specialty in Networking & Security

HP-UX Certified Systems Administrator (CSA) - HP-UX 11i v3

Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)

GIAC Certified UNIX Security Administrator (GCUX)

GIAC Information Security Professional (GISP)

GIAC Systems and Network Auditor (GSNA)

Novell Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server version 11

Novell Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server version 10

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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1ST EDITION VIRTUALIZING HP-UX SERVERS AND APPLICATIONS

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