| The various partitioning solutions in the VSE are almost arbitrarily stackable. The only exception is the fact that you cannot run Integrity VM and vPars in the same nPar. Inside each partition type you can run: nPartitions: Virtual Partitions, Integrity VMs, or Secure Resource Partitions. In other words, you can run any one of these to subdivide each nPar. In addition, you can mix and match these in any combination in separate nPars. Virtual Partitions: Secure Resource Partitions. You can run SRPs inside vPars if you want to save on the management and maintenance costs of separate OS images for each application. Integrity VM: Secure Resource Partitions. You can run SRPs inside VMs as well.
If we take a look at all the sweet spots described in this chapter and think about how they might be combined to take advantage of all the technologies where they are most useful, we would get something along the lines of Figure 3-4. Figure 3-4. Combining the Sweet Spots of All the Partitions in a Two-Node High-Availability Cluster 
This figure shows what is possible with the partitioning continuum. It is likely that you will choose one or two partitioning alternatives and roll those out. That said, the real benefit we are trying to show here is the flexibility; you can implement whatever combinations make sense for your solution. Let's analyze this configuration: We have the ability to run 32 workloads of various sizes on the two nodes. Each system has a total of 64 physical CPUs, but only 32 of them are active. This is sufficient to handle the normal peak load of the 32 workloads. This provides us room for growth and the ability to react to short-term peaks in load. This also makes these systems significantly less expensive than they would be if we needed to purchase all the spare capacity up front. Effectively, HP is paying for much of the cost of your headroom. Each system is configured with four nPars. This ensures that a hardware failure will not take down more than 25% of the system. This load can easily be absorbed by the other system on a failover because of the Instant Capacity available there. Each of these systems has Temporary Instant Capacity as well. This will be described in more detail in Part 2 of this book. For the purposes of this discussion, this will give us the ability to instantly activate additional capacity when needed. Spreading this load over two nodes allows us to provide high availability. Two of the workloads have their own nPars. These are relatively large workloads that normally peak out at about eight CPUs but will occasionally go over that. These nPars have 16 physical CPUs each and we will use temporary capacity for the infrequent times that they go over eight CPUs. We have 16 Integrity VMs that each have four virtual CPUs. These workloads can consume a small fraction of a CPU if they are idle and can go up to four full CPUs when they get busy. These nPars also have instant capacity processors, so in the infrequent case where we have more than a few of these VMs getting busy at the same time, we can instantly activate additional capacity. We have eight vPars, each of which can scale from one to four CPUs. These are for our smaller I/O-intensive workloads where peak performance is critical. Again, there are eight instant capacity processors available in each nPar just in case more than a few of these workloads get busy at the same time. If only a few of them are peaking at any time, the peaking vPars can be scaled up by borrowing CPUs from the other idle vPars. Finally we have two nPars running Secure Resource Partitions. These are all running the same version of the same application, so we get the benefits of lower maintenance costs in addition to the lower software and hardware costs because we can run six copies on the 16 active CPUs. If we put these on individual systems or partitions they would each need six CPUs. We just dropped our active CPU count for hardware and software licensing from 36 to 16. And, as before, we have instant capacity processors that can take these nPars up to a total of 32 processors if more than a few of these peaked all at once.
There you have it. These systems are using all of the partition types, have an incredible amount of flexibility and scalability, and are paired for high availability. Some of you might be concerned about how you would manage an environment like this. Have we got a deal for you! In Part 3 of this book we describe a new set of management tools designed to make the management and maintenance of a dynamic Virtual Server Environment much easier. |
