Chapter Overview

Many data centers are built with redundancy and failover mechanisms that can handle serious disaster situations. In most cases, HP Serviceguard has been configured to failover a workload to a separate system should a problem occur with the primary hardware or software. While redundant hardware configurations do provide robust computing environments, it is costly to maintain hardware that is grossly underutilized while waiting for a failover to occur. One of HP's solutions to this problem is the Temporary Instant Capacity program. Like the Instant Capacity program, Temporary Instant Capacity allows users to purchase a system without licensing all of the hardware at the time of the initial purchase. This provides a great deal of flexibility to handle situations, such as a way to temporarily activate unlicensed hardware when a Serviceguard failover occurs. After the primary hardware and software environment has been restored, the unlicensed components can be deactivated. The Temporary Instant Capacity that has been purchased is consumed only when it's needed.

As part of HP's Virtual Server Environment, Temporary Instant Capacity enables hardware resources to be instantly activated only when they are needed. Using Temporary Instant Capacity allows unlicensed CPUs to be deactivated when they are not needed. In contrast, Instant Capacity right-to-use licenses are permanent; when a license is applied, it permanently activates resources.

This chapter provides an overview of Temporary Instant Capacity along with some of the fundamental Temporary Instant Capacity terminology. The bulk of the chapter discusses an example scenario that picks up where the example in Chapter 10, "Instant Capacity," left off. The scenario describes the process of activating and deactivating unlicensed CPUs in an environment where a testing nPartition is serving as a Serviceguard failover for a production workload.