For more than 14 years, VMware and HP have been working together to help customers realize the benefits of virtualization. Our two respective companies have recently reached another milestone in our efforts to simplify infrastructure management and move customers toward a software-defined data center. Last September, HP launched HP OneView, the first infrastructure management software platform that is designed around how users, not devices, interact with complex and highly dynamic systems. This platform unifies processes, user interface (UI), and application programming interfaces (APIs) across server, storage and networking and includes software-defined process templates for “get it right” repeatability every time, reducing your risk. Everyday tasks and collaboration are much more automated, natural and streamlined, simplifying the management of compute, network and storage resources in physical and virtual environments.
In February, HP OneView was integrated with VMware vCenter via a plug-in called HP OneView for VMware vCenter (formerly called Insight Control for VMware vCenter Server). It is the only platform that lets you provision, monitor, update and scale resources without ever having to leave your vCenter console.
This is great news for vCenter users for several reasons. The HP OneView for VMware vCenter plug-in (watch demo) reduces the time required to make important changes, increase capacity or manage planned and unplanned downtime. And, when used with the automation power of HP OneView, best practices for a converged infrastructure management can be defined once and reused many times.
- You have easy access in vCenter to health, inventory and configuration monitoring. With a graphical view of all network and storage connectivity, you can easily understand how resources are configured and quickly assess the impact of faults and configuration changes.
- The visual mapping of virtualized workloads to physical resources make it possible to troubleshoot network problems in a matter of seconds where the norm is hours.
- You can automate actions on pre-failure alerts from HP Server components including automatic evacuation of virtual machines (VMs) based on events that affect your physical systems. Templates are provided and ready to be configured.
- You can provision an entire vSphere cluster with compute and storage fully configured in five easy steps.
You really can manage your infrastructure more easily and efficiently. For example, if you’re a virtualization administrator, you don’t have to understand the storage tools because HP OneView uses templates and automates the provisioning and management behind the scenes. The number of tools you need to learn, manage, deploy and integrate is cut in half, making it possible to consolidate and simplify your current operations, which saves you time and money.
New integrations in VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) and VMware vCenter Log Insight are also included in this single plug-in download and deliver powerful analytics and deeper troubleshooting tools to VMware administrators. Combining the performance, capacity and configuration management in vCOPS with the infrastructure lifecycle management and automation in HP OneView provides a much higher level of software-defined infrastructure management than has been previously available at a lower price. Other features and benefits include:
- You can now get access to HP OneView Server and Infrastructure topology, status and events within the vCOPs environment
- You can much more easily correlate and manage physical and virtual infrastructure
- Access to key HP operational metrics can help you dramatically improve trend and root cause/impact analyses
- Online firmware inventory and deployment with HP OneView helps you better maintain stability and reliability in your environment
VMware’s Brent Sullivan, and Jeff Carlat, director at HP, discuss the benefits of having HP OneView integrated with VMware vCenter and vCOPS to support HP 3PAR storage, as well as HP servers, BladeSystem and converged system products in this video.
The integration of HP OneView with VMware vCenter is one more proof point of how VMware and HP collaborate to help our customers gain greater business efficiencies and create greater business opportunities for your organizations. For more information, go to HP OneView for VMware vCenter or try HP OneView for a 60 day free trial.
