Installing and Managing HP-UX Virtual Partitions (A.01.01)

Planning Your Virtual Partitions and Installing vPars
Planning Your Virtual Partitions
Chapter 4 53
Recommended Number of Partitions
For performance reasons, HP recommends the following:
Maximum Number of Partitions
The maximum number of partitions for the L3000 and N-class computers
is the number of CPUs given the following limitations:
• Because the I/O combo cards are not supported for boot disks and if
you require a network interface for each partition, the maximum
number of partitions for the N-class is 7.
Given that each partition requires 2 PCI slots (one SCSI or FC card
and one LAN card) and each N-class has 12 external PCI slots, this
provides a maximum of 6 partitions. The core I/O provides for one
boot disk and one LAN port, which provides for an additional 1
partition, resulting in a maximum of 7 partitions.
• The maximum number of partitions can be limited by the total size of
the kernels in memory for all the virtual partitions. In general terms,
the sum of the size of the kernels must be < 2 GB.
If you use the defaults of the dynamic tunables, you will not run into
the 2 GB limit. However, if you have adjusted the dynamic tunables,
it is possible to run beyond the 2 GB boundary. You can perform the
calculations described in the appendix “Calculating the Size of
Kernels in Memory” on page 127.
For more information on dynamic tunables, see the white paper
Dynamically Tunable Kernel Parameters in HP-UX 11i at
http://docs.hp.com.
Virtual Partition Names
All virtual partitions must be given text names that are used by the
vPars commands. The names can consists of only alphanumeric
characters and periods (’.’). The maximum length of a name is 239
characters.
Computer Number of Partitions
L3000 up to 2 partitions
N-class up to 4 partitions