3.4 Planning Your Virtual Partitions

     

One of the first tasks with Virtual Partitions is to establish how much hardware you have in your current non Virtual Partition server. This can be a process of running various ioscan commands and probably drawing a schematic diagram of what hardware you have available. Here is a diagram of what we have in our Superdome nPar in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2. nPar physical configuration

Drawing this schematic diagram is a good exercise, as we need to plan the configuration VERY carefully . When you have lots more hardware, sometimes it becomes obvious which divisions to make when creating multiple vPars; e.g., with a 2- cell partition, it might be obvious to create 2 vPars using CPUs from a specific cells to be members of a particular vPar. The unused ( unbound ) CPUs could float between either vPar, although it would be better for performance to localize CPU/memory IO to within a single cell.

What I need to do is assign LBAs (specific interface cards) to individual vPars. I need to remember to create in each vPar enough hardware to support a basic server:

• At least 1 CPU

• The minimum amount of memory to support HP-UX (1GB per CPU works better)

• IO capability to support a boot device

• A LAN card (probably) to support networking

I have spent some time considering how to divide up this nPar. The solution I have come up with is to create two vPars (I currently don't have enough disks to configure any more vPars). I have split the 12-slot IO cardcage and RAM into separate chunks just to allow us to visualize each vPar as a separate server. Here's my plan, see Figure 3-3.

Figure 3-3. Intended vPar configuration

We can summarize the hardware details of each Virtual Partition as follows :

1. vPar0

   - Physical Memory: 2GB

   - Total Number of CPU: 2

   • Total number of Bound CPU: 1 (2/10)

   • Total Number of Unbound CPU: 1

   - Assigned LBA:

   • 2/0/0

   • 2/0/1

   • 2/0/2

   • 2/0/3

   • 2/0/10

   • 2/0/11

   • 2/0/12

   • 2/0/14

   - Boot device: 2/0/1/0/0.0.0

   - Alternate Boot device: 2/0/11/0/0.3.0

2. vPar0

   - Physical Memory: 2GB

   - Total Number of CPU: 2

   • Total number of Bound CPU: 1 (2/12)

   • Total Number of Unbound CPU: 1

   - Assigned LBA:

   • 2/0/4

   • 2/0/6

   • 2/0/9

   • 2/0/8

   - Boot device: 2/0/4/0/0.8.0

Once our plan has been finalized, we can start to consider creating the vPars themselves .