Introduction to HP-UX Virtual Partitions v6 on HP Integrity blades

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Introduction
Today’s data centers need to be flexible in order to meet the increasing demands from existing customers as well as
new project requests. Ideally, these demands are met quickly with minimal overhead while providing a relatively high
level of isolation from other workloads. For most data centers, the best solution is one that better utilizes current
capacity to satisfy these new demands and provides existing customers with the capacity they expect. The ideal
solution enables IT managers the ability to keep the total cost of ownership low while maintaining high levels of
responsiveness to customer demands.
To address this challenge, HP has introduced the Mission-critical Converged Infrastructure as the foundation for the
next decade of computing. The newest line of HP Integrity systems combines years of trusted HP Integrity resiliency
with HP BladeSystem efficiencies. As the foundation of the world's first Mission-critical Converged Infrastructure,
Integrity systems simplify and unify IT with a common modular architecture from x86 to Superdome 2 and provide:
• Always on Resiliency—a secure and reliable infrastructure from CPU to solution.
• Dynamic Optimization—integrated management and virtualization to optimally scale resources.
• Investment Protection & Stability—sustained innovation, decades of support life, and compelling value.
Specifically in the area of dynamic optimization, Hewlett-Packard has created the HP Matrix Operating Environment,
an integrated server virtualization solution suite for HP Integrity and ProLiant servers providing a flexible computing
environment to maximize the usage of server resources. The Matrix Operating Environment encompasses a number of
fully integrated, complementary components that enhance the functionality and flexibility of servers including
workload management, software availability, virtualization and utility pricing.
HP offers a comprehensive range of partitioning and virtualization capabilities known as the HP Virtualization
Continuum (Figure 1). These capabilities span virtual machines, hard partitions, soft partitions, and containers, which
can be used together for even greater combined functionality.
This paper introduces HP-UX Virtual Partitions Version 6 (vPars v6)—soft partitions that are a part of the
HP Virtualization Continuum for HP-UX. Virtual Partitions v6 provides granularity down to the processor core level and
features shared I/O. Each vPar runs its own separately licensed version of the HP-UX 11i v3 Operating Environment.
This approach is useful when individual applications need fewer resources than the overall server or hard partition,
thus applications experience isolation from one another yielding increased reliability, application specific tuning and
specific software version compatibility, if needed.
Core-level granularity and dedicated resources are well established as an integral part of HP-UX mission-critical
customer deployments. HP-UX vPars v6 builds on these core strengths and introduces features making managing and
enabling vPars in an HP Converged Infrastructure easier and enables vPars running on HP’s Integrity server blades.
Figure 1: HP Virtualization Continuum for HP-UX