Chapter Overview

HP's Virtual Server Environment have one thing in common. They require a distinct operating system to be configured and maintained for every partition. Regardless of whether nPartitions, virtual partitions, or virtual machines are being employed, the technology requires a separate operating system. While this is certainly acceptable and often desired to ensure that applications retain a high level of isolation, it is not always necessary. In some situations it is perfectly acceptable for multiple applications to coexist within the same operating system. When users stack multiple applications in a single operating system, the first question they typically ask is, "How do I ensure that one application won't starve the others during times of peak resource utilization?" Secure Resource Partitions are the answer to this question.

Secure Resource Partitions (SRPs) allow multiple workloads to be hosted within a single operating system while retaining both resource and security isolation. Each SRP is assigned a subset of the operating system's CPU, memory, and disk I/O resources. In addition, workloads running within a SRP can be completely isolated from a security standpoint to ensure that an errant workload has no effect on the others within the operating system image. One of the major benefits of SRPs is that workloads are guaranteed access to a subset of the operating system's hardware without requiring a distinct operating system. For example, if five instances of a database are needed, a single operating system can be configured with SRPs and each instance can be associated with a unique SRP. The SRPs are isolated from the standpoint of security and resource utilization.

This chapter begins with an overview of the SRP technology. A description of the two CPU allocation managers, the fair share scheduler (FSS) and processor sets (PSETs) is provided. Following the SRP overview, the fundamental terminology relating to SRPs is detailed. Finally, an example scenario is covered that uses SRPs within a virtual partition environment. Each SRP is configured to run an instance of an Oracle database and provide resource isolation within each virtual partition.