Ways of Managing nPartitions

nPartitions can be managed across a wide range of system operation. You can work with nPartitions at a very low level of the system such as the Guardian Service Processor (GSP,) or what I'll be calling the Management Processor (MP) in this chapter, or after HP-UX has booted with nPartitions commands or the menu driven Partition Manager ( /opt/parmgr/bin/parmgr .) The following list summarizes the many options available to you for managing nPartitions, beginning with the lowest level tools and progressing to the highest level tools:

Management Processor	The Management Processor is a low level means of accessing the system. The Management Processor has its own unique set of commands, some of which we'll cover later. You gain access to the Service Process using telnet. because it has two network connections on it, one called a Customer LAN and the other called a Private LAN. You would typically use the Customer LAN to access the Management Processor. The Management Processor is also known as the Guardian Service Processor (GSP) and Service Processor so you may see these names used for the Management Processor, all of which represent the same method of accessing the system.
Virtual Front Panel	The Virtual Front Panel (VFP) shows activity of one or more nPartitions and is invoked through the Management Processor. Although this is a subset of the overall Management Processor functionality, it is widely used and is therefore considered its own tool.
HP-UX Commands	There are a variety of commands which you can issue that allow you to get useful information, and to configure and modify nPartitions from HP-UX. I'll provide examples of some of these commands and list all of them in an upcoming section.
Partition Manager	Partition Manager provides an interface ( parmgr ) through which you can interact with nPartitions. This interface can also be invoked from System Administration Manager (SAM.)
Boot- Related Commands	There are several ways of interacting with nPartitions at the time of boot including: Boot Control Handler (BCH), Initial System Loader (ISL), and other boot-related interfaces. We'll cover booting nPartitions in an upcoming section and describe these.

As usual, the best way to learn about a topic is to work through some examples, so let's do just that in the upcoming sections.