Virtualizing Legacy PA-RISC Based Servers and Applications

Patrick Wallek Critical Systems Software Engineer Service IT Direct

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Customer Problems 3 Customer 1 Legacy Configuration 4 Test & Development Servers 4 Production Servers 4 Totals 5 Customer 2 Legacy Configuration 6 Servers & Storage 6 Totals 7

Solution 8 What are HP9000 Containers? 8 Customer 1 Solution 9 Customer 2 Solution 10 Container Setup 11

Conclusion 12

About Service IT Direct 13

Abstract

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 white paper 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.

Customer Problems

Service IT Direct was approached by two customers asking for a solution that would allow them to modernize their aging PA-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.

Customer 1 Legacy Configuration

CUSTOMER BACKUP Test & Development Servers RESULTS • HP9000 A500 o 2 x 550 MHz CPUs Disk-to-disk hot backups of o 5 GB RAM the Oracle databases were o 140 GB Disk Space run nightly. o HP-UX 11.11 o Running custom legacy application The database sizes, at the • HP9000 D390 time these results were o 2 x 240 MHz CPUs recorded, were: o 1.5 GB RAM PROD: 550 GB o 190 GB Disk Space NV: 90 GB o HP-UX 10.20 WIPROD: 75 GB o Running Oracle Applications 10.7 WFCPROD: 25 GB • HP9000 L1000 o 2 x 360 MHz CPUs On the legacy physical o 8 GB RAM systems, the backups ran in: o 3.5 TB Disk Space

▪ StorageTek disk array PROD: 5.1 hours o HP-UX 11.00 NV: 1.3 hours o WIPROD: 1 hour Running Oracle 8i and 9i databases WFCPROD: 30 minutes • HP9000 L2000 o 2 x 440 MHz CPUs On the new containerized o 2 GB RAM system, with new disk o 34 GB Disk Space storage, the backups ran in: o HP-UX 11.00 o Running Oracle Web Forms & Reports PROD: 1.5 hours NV: 50 minutes Production Servers WIPROD: 15 minutes • HP9000 K580 WFCPROD: 10 minutes o 6 x 240 MHz CPUs o 4 GB RAM These improvements in o 340 GB Disk Space backup speed were very well ▪ 2 Fibre attached disk trays (JBOD) received by the customer. o HP-UX 10.20 o Running Oracle Applications 10.7

• HP9000 L1000 o 4 x 360 MHz CPUs CUSTOMER SQLPLUS o 1 GB RAM QUERY RESULTS o 314 GB Disk Space o HP-UX 11.00 o Running Legacy HR applications In order to establish some • performance metrics for HP9000 L2000 both the physical and o 2 x 440 MHz CPUs containerized systems I ran o 2 GB RAM a simple SQLPLUS select o 72 GB Disk Space statement against a o HP-UX 11.00 database table with o Running MicroFocus COBOL license manager approximately 45 million • HP9000 L2000 records. o 2 x 440 MHz CPUs o 6 GB RAM o 72 GB Disk Space SQLPLUS statement: select o HP-UX 11.00 count(*) from o Running Oracle Web Forms & Reports inv.mtl_material_transactio ns; • HP9000 N4000 o 8 x 440 MHz CPUs o 16 GB RAM Physical system: o 4 TB Disk Space ▪ 10 Fibre attached disk trays (JBOD) Run 1: 14 min 43.75 sec ▪ StorageTek Disk Array Run 2: 15 min 7.05 sec o HP-UX 11.0

o Running Oracle 8i & 9i databases Containerized system: Totals Run 1: 39.41 sec • Servers – 9 Run 2: 36.92 sec • RAM – 37.5 GB • Storage – 8.5 TB • Rack Units – 157 (approx. 3.5 Racks) • Watts of Power – 29,300

Customer 2 Legacy Configuration

CUSTOMER ORACLE APPLICATIONS JOBS Servers & Storage • HP9000 D370 o 2 x 160 MHz CPUs Oracle Applications is a o 2 GB RAM major part of the o 220 GB Disk Space customer’s business. o HP-UX 10.20 Because of that it was o General HP-UX test for legacy applications important to establish that those jobs were running • HP9000 K370 significantly faster as well. o 4 x 200 MHz CPUs o 4 GB RAM o 278 GB Disk Space Two typically long running o HP-UX 10.20 jobs are “Load NV Item o Running Oracle 7.3.4 databases Costs” and “DPS Insert • HP9000 K370 Usage”. o 4 x 200 MHz CPUs o 4 GB RAM o 311 GB Disk Space The run time of the “Load o HP-UX 10.20 NV Item Costs” job was: o Running custom legacy applications Physical: 1 hour • HP9000 K570 Containerized: 15 min o 6 x 200 MHz CPUs o 4 GB RAM The run time of the “DPS o 223 GB Disk Space Insert Usage” job was: o HP-UX 10.20 o Running custom legacy applications Physical: 1 hour • HP9000 rp5450 Containerized: 6 min o 4 x 440 MHz CPUs o 8 GB RAM o 400 GB Disk Space o HP-UX 11.00 o Running Oracle 8.1.7 databases

• HP9000 rp5450 o 4 x 440 MHz CPUs CUSTOMER ORACLE o 8 GB RAM APPLICATIONS REPORT o 202 GB Disk Space SERVER o HP-UX 11.00 o Running Oracle 7.3.4 databases Since Oracle Applications • HP9000 rp5450 are such an important part o 4 x 440 MHz CPUs of the customer’s business, o 8 GB RAM it was important to verify o that reports run through 510 GB Disk Space Oracle Applications were o HP-UX 11.00 also performing better in o Running Oracle 8.1.7 databases the new containerized • HP9000 rp5450 system. o 4 x 440 MHz CPUs

o 16 GB RAM The customer receives a report that details the o 560 GB Disk Space number of report requests o HP-UX 11.11 processed, the total run o Running custom legacy applications time, longest wait time and • Storage average wait time for the o LUNs presented from Hitachi disk array previous 24 hours. Totals • Servers – 8 Physical system: Total requests: 5,942 • RAM – 54 GB Total Run Time: 24.04 Hrs • Storage – 2.7 TB Avg. wait time: 1.06 Min • Rack Units – 102 Longest wait time: 87.58 • Watts of Power – 17,600 Min As you can see, each of the two customers had quite a Containerized System: collection of legacy servers running multiple versions of HP- Total requests: 5,627 UX, various applications and multiple versions of Oracle Total Run Time: 5.44 Hrs databases. Avg. wait time: 0.76 Min Longest wait time: 21.02 This poses quite a challenge because no Itanium based HP- Min UX servers are capable of running any of the older versions of HP-UX.

These was an impressive Another challenge we faced was finding sufficient storage, at increase in performance. a reasonable price, for each customer that also allowed for redundancy in an HPE Serviceguard cluster.

Solution CUSTOMER What are HP9000 Containers? FEEDBACK The solution we came up with for both customers was to utilize a product developed by HPE called HPE 9000 Feedback from the Containers. accounting department: From the HPE 9000 Containers product page: “The long running reports that I ran that normally take “HPE 9000 Containers is a set of tools designed to enable 1 hour took between 1 - 8 quick transition of application environment from an HPE 9000 minutes.” 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 “The daily Cognos cube ran individual applications, or reconstructing the application in 14 minutes. Normal time ecosystem, with minimal reconfiguration and application is 30 min. [MS] Access is inventory preparation effort.” running extremely fast, connecting to [the] NV This is the key part of solution for both customers. This [database]. Kronos product gives you the ability to migrate HP-UX 10.20, 11.0, timecards ran in half the 11.11 and 11.23 workloads from PA-RISC based systems to a time, before time was 7 container on an Itanium based system running HP-UX 11.31. min, current time is 3 min.” The container that is created, generally from an Ignite/UX backup of your legacy system, will be a near duplicate image “From Finance, Day 1 of that system. Once both the HP-UX operating system and closing the accounting all your applications and data have been migrated to the period in AP, Purchasing, container, everything should run normally. This is possible and Inventory went because all operating system libraries, application binaries significantly quicker than and libraries, and application data all seem to still be running normal, and on Day 2 & 3 in an instance, the container, of the legacy version of the there was no slow down posting JE's and running operating system. So, nothing seems to have changed as far reports. Overall, there was as your applications are concerned. no time that people were The container itself is running on the HP-UX 11.31 host complaining that "Oracle is system. The host is able to run these PA-RISC based systems slow".” 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.

Once it was determined that HP9000 Containers would work in the customer environments, we proceeded to build a CUSTOMER solution around this technology for each customer. FEEDBACK Customer 1 Solution

Feedback from the The solution we developed for the first customer consisted manufacturing department: of:

“From Manufacturing, the • 3 x HPE rx2800 i4 servers each with close reports ran in just o 8 Core 2.53 GHz CPU over an hour, where they o 64 GB RAM normally run in 5 hours. The o 2 x 10 Gb Ethernet adapters plant was able to come out o 2 x 300 GB Internal disk drives (RAID 1 pair) of "disaster recovery" mode o HP-UX 11.31 running on the internal drives as (they have to manually the container host record transactions until the o 3 node HPE Serviceguard cluster point in time inventory • HPE MSA 2040 disk array reports are complete) and o 24 x 600 GB 15K RPM drives resume entry to Oracle much sooner, which always o Add-on DS2700 enclosure with 24 x 1.2 TB 10K helps in data integrity.” RPM drive o 2 x iSCSI controllers From the Information • 2 x Dell 24 port 10 Gb ethernet switches Technology department: o Dedicated to iSCSI communication between the servers and disk array “From IT, our processes to update sales and inventory When configuring this solution, the intent was to have tables ran much quicker, sufficient resources such that any container could run on any and the final Inventory server at any time. grading cube was complete before 5:00pm on Day 1. Finance uses these tables The 3 node Serviceguard cluster is set up so that each and cubes for analysis and individual container is a Serviceguard package. As such, each to generate close JE's and container can run on any of the 3 systems. The standard are normally anxiously configuration assigns the production database container to waiting for these processes one server, the rest of the production systems to a 2nd to be complete.” 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 CUSTOMER be ideal from a performance perspective. FEEDBACK This solution saved significant rack space and power consumption. There is a total of only 12 RU and 4,150 watts “Our developers have of power used. This is a savings of 145 RU (approx. 3.5 stated they have seen racks) and more than 25,000 watts. signification improvement in query speed for their Oracle databases.” Customer 2 Solution

“We are able to restart our containers in a matter of a The solution we developed for the second customer minute rather than 25 consisted of: minutes for the physical • 2 x HPE rx2800 i2 servers each with servers.” o 4 Core 1.6 GHz CPU o 96 GB RAM “The ability to move o 2 x dual port 8 Gb Fibre cards containers between the o 2 x 300 GB Internal disk drives (RAID 1 pair) compute nodes makes it o HP-UX 11.31 running on the internal drives as much easier to recover from the container host a server outage.” o 2 node HPE Serviceguard cluster

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

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 CUSTOMER watts of power used. This is a savings of 96 RU (approx. FEEDBACK 2.25 racks) and more than 14,500 watts.

“There is an ease of Container Setup administration that is impossible with individual Setting up HPE 9000 Containers is not necessarily difficult, servers, as in being able to access the filesystems and but it can be time consuming depending on the amount of processes of each container, data you have to migrate from the physical system to the that facilitates the quick container. The HP 9000 Containers A.03.01 on HP Integrity addition of files, monitoring Server Administration Guide HP-UX 11i v3 contains excellent and troubleshooting.“ step-by-step instructions for setting up a container.

“The ability to quickly run commands on a single Each physical system for each customer was converted to a or each container in turn separate container. Once the base HP-UX operating system using the srp_su was running in a container, we migrated the data from the command.” 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 file systems. 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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR the cluster. 13) Once testing has completed and all is OK, schedule time to move containers into production. 14) Migrate data to containers again. I joined Service IT Direct 15) Shut down physical system(s). in May 2011 as a Critical 16) Change IP address(es) to production IP address(es). Systems Software 17) Verify containers are running normally and all apps Engineer with the primary responsibility of work. supporting the HP-UX operating system for When I was working on these projects, each customer used Service IT Direct different scheduling methods for migration, depending on customers. I have more the server’s function. than 25 years of experience in the IT Field. The migration plans for both customers involved migrating I was first exposed to HP- some of the test / development servers during normal UX in 1992 and started business hours during the work week. When it came to working as a full-time HP- migrating production servers, Customer 1 requested that UX Systems Administrator their 3 main servers be migrated over Memorial Day in 1998. I am experienced weekend. Customer 2 scheduled 1 or 2 servers each in HP-UX versions 10.20, 11.0, 11.11 (11i v1), 11.23 weekend for 3 or 4 weeks to migrate their production (11i v2) and 11.31 (11i servers. v3). Any migration to production is a matter of the amount of I am a frequent downtime that your business can withstand and figuring out contributor to the HP how to schedule appropriately. Enterprise Business Community Forums (formerly the ITRC Forums) and I am Conclusion currently ranked 7th all- time in the overall forums The HPE 9000 Containers has proven to be an excellent and 5th all-time in the solution for these 2 customers. HP-UX category. 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 Service IT Direct at 888-596-4720 or e-mail us at [email protected].

About Service IT Direct

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.