Summary

Secure Resource Partitions rely on the HP Process Resource Manager product and provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and control in environments where operating system isolation is not required. Each SRP is guaranteed a portion of a system's resources and is isolated from a security standpoint. The sub-CPU granularity provided by SRPs allows fine control over resource allocation. Using SRPs makes possible high system utilization and lower maintenance costs as fewer operating systems and applications must be installed, configured, and maintained.

SRP configurations can use any combination of the CPU manager, the memory manager, the disk I/O bandwidth manager, and secure compartments. The CPU manager is responsible for ensuring that CPU entitlements are being met by scheduling processes according to workload demands and SRP entitlements. The memory manager allows memory resources to be controlled and even capped to ensure that each workload has the necessary memory available when it is required. The disk I/O bandwidth manager rearranges I/O requests to meet the requested entitlements of each SRP. Secure compartments protect workloads from other processes on the system.

The example scenario in this chapter demonstrates the use of SRPs in an nPartition that contains virtual partitions. The virtual partitions are divided into SRPs and each SRP is running a separate instance of a database. Each instance of the database is guaranteed an amount of the operating system's resources but is able to share resources when they are available. This configuration illustrates the power and flexibility offered through combinations of the partitioning technologies in HP's Virtual Server Environment.