Benefits of using SA for virtualization management

HPE-supported integrations with virtualization vendors and cloud computing solutions are referred to collectively as virtualization services.

The virtualization vendors manage multiple hypervisors and VMs in a virtualization environment. HPE supports integration with VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Cloud computing solutions such as OpenStack offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). HPE supports limited integration with OpenStack.

Virtualization management in HPE Server Automation provides:

• Visibility into your datacenter and all your physical and virtual machines (VMs).
• Compliance with all your regulatory and enterprise policies.
• Controlover your entire virtual environment so you can keep VM sprawl in check, and detect and resolve problems quickly.

Visibility

SA provides full visibility into your hybrid, heterogeneous, distributed datacenters:

• Genealogy of VMs - SA records how each VM was created and displays it in the Virtualization view of the SA Client. You can also perform searches on how VMs were created.
• Search for VMs by Virtual Characteristics - Advanced search allows you to locate VMs, VM templates, hypervisors, clusters, resource pools, and datacenters by cluster properties, resource pool properties, number of processors, datastore, hypervisor, memory, creation method, power state, and many other criteria.
• One Tool, One Unified View - SA Client’s integrated view lets you see and manage your physical and virtual assets across virtualization technologies and in all your datacenters.
• Support for Major Virtualization and Cloud Vendors - You can view and manage virtual machines and virtual environments from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and OpenStack. SA allows you to synchronize with these vendors’ tools to ensure you have access to all changes and can update your data accurately.
• Across Physical and Virtual Machines - You can use the same processes to view, provision, install software and patches, configure, audit, and remediate your physical servers and VMs.
• See All Virtual Assets - SA provides comprehensive details about all your virtual assets, such as datacenters, resource pools, projects, clusters, hypervisors, virtual machines, folders, datastores, and network elements.
• See Outside and Inside Servers - SA gives you a view of both the outside of your servers – location, relationships with other servers – and inside your servers – hardware, software, and configurations:
  • See Outside Your VMs - SA provides a single view of your entire datacenter, across physical and virtual boundaries, across virtualization vendors, across networks, and across geographies.
  • See Inside Your Servers - SA lets you manage and provision the operating system, install and configure software, install patches, audit servers to detect compliance drift, and remediate servers to bring them back into compliance.
  • Extensible – You can store any custom information about your VMs in custom attributes. Then you can perform operations based on custom attribute values.
• All Major Operating Systems - You can provision, configure, and manage servers running on operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux Enterprise, VMware ESX, Oracle Solaris/SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
• Storage - SA gives you end-to-end visibility to your datastore inventory, physical and virtual disks, and DVDs.
• Networks - You can view detailed network information about physical servers and VMs, their network connections, and interfaces.

Compliance

With SA, you can keep your physical servers and VMs in compliance with your enterprise business, industry, and government IT requirements:

• Create VM Templates from Baseline Servers - VM templates contain everything needed to create standard, fully compliant, and fully manageable VMs – operating system, patches and patch policies, and software and software policies.
• Guest Customization - After you create VMs, you can modify them to be network ready.
• Audit Reports Detect Compliance Drift – Regular audits identify servers that have been modified and are no longer in compliance.
• Remediate Servers Back Into Compliance – You can bring all your noncompliant servers back into compliance by installing required software and patches and reconfiguring your systems and software.

Control

SA provides users with the ability to create and manage VMs:

• Full End-to-End VM Life Cycle - You may create compliant, provisioned VMs from templates; monitor, modify, audit, and remediate them to keep them in compliance; and delete them when you no longer need them.
• Discovery - SA discovers the environment managed by a Virtualization Service (VS) to provide an inventory of VMs and associated networking and storage assets.
• Create and Provision - You may create, clone, and deploy VMs from templates. All VMs are provisioned with the operating system, application software, and configurations your users need and your IT standards require.
• Place VMs - SA provides you with full visibility and placement control.
• Update Templates - Keep your templates up to date with the latest patches, software, and configurations.
• Detect Changes and Resolve Problems - Detect changes and solve problems across all physical servers and VMs.
• Power Controls - With SA, you have full power controls over your VMs, including power on, power off, suspend, pause, reset, restart guest, and shut down guest.
• Performance - Allows you to detect overloaded and underutilized resources and move VMs from one host to another to balance resource usage.
• Quick Access - SA provides quick access to your servers with SA’s Global Shell and remote login.