Book Review

The HP Virtual Server Environment
Dan Herington & Bryan Jacquot

I had been piddling my way through this book for about a year and a half now. I actually lost it for about 5 months, and found it last week. Since I got it back, I figured it was time to buckle down and finish the thing.

This book is a very good overview of what virtualization tools HP offers for it's Integrity servers. If this makes no sense to you at this point, you can stop reading this blog entry.

The book goes through everything, from clustering large machines (serviceguard), to carving big machines in pieces (npars), to virtual carving in pieces (vpars), and finally down into slicing in VMs (Integrity VMs). They call it the HP partitioning continum. They do a very good job explaining each topic, with lots of diagrams and easy to understand prose. They also talk about things like instant capacity and pay per use. They spend plenty of time going over the management tools associated with these products.

If you are planning on diving into the HP Integrity VM arena (Especially running Integrity VMs), I highly recommend that you get and read this book. Even if you aren't, but you are looking at buying HPUX hardware, I suggest reading the book, it might make you decide to do some virtualization, which could save you money.

By the way, I got this book for free from the authors right after they published it. After I lost it, I decided we had a couple of people here that needed to read it so they understood what offerings existed. Since I lost the book, I called up our HP sales guy and asked if he had a copy I could borrow. He ended up comping another copy for us to have. Nice, huh?