Mixed OS (HP-UX 11i v1/v2/v3) Considerations in vPars
6. Pitfalls: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
Along with the benefits of operating virtual partitions in a mixed HP-UX 11i v1/v2/v3 vPars
environment, there are certain scenarios that could result in confusion. These are listed here to help
you configure your environment in such a way to obtain the full benefits of operating in a mixed HP-
UX 11i v1/v2/v3 vPars environment.
• Configuration in which there are no virtual partitions running vPars A.05.03
booted: The user might have a setup where the hard partition boot disk has vPars A.05.03
installed on it but does not assign that boot disk to any of the virtual partitions. The user only
boots up three virtual partitions, vPar1, vPar2 and vPar3 as shown below in Figure 4. This
configuration will operate fine as long as the user doesn’t want to make any modifications to
the configuration such as create new virtual partitions or modify the booted virtual partitions
(such as add new boot path). That is, the vPars configuration will be restrictive unless the user
switches to nPars mode to make modifications to the vPars database. Each virtual partition
will be able to make modifications to itself if the operation is supported. For example,
addition/removal of CPUs and changing boot options, will continue to work. This is
applicable to mixed HP-UX 11i v1-v2 vPar environments also running on a vPars A.04.05
monitor.
• (HP Integrity only) nPars mode primary/alternate path not updated to HP-UX
11i v3: This scenario can occur if a virtual partitions configuration is updated from HP-UX
11i v2 to a mixed HP-UX 11i v2/11i v3 environment and the updates are done such that the
nPars mode primary and secondary boot disks are not updated to HP-UX 11i v3. The result
of this update will be that the user will have to manually locate a boot disk which has HP-UX
11i v3 and vPars A.05.01 (or later) installed on it to boot the A.05.01 monitor. This is an
issue mainly on HP Integrity systems because it is not straightforward to find a disk (other than
the primary/secondary) from the EFI shell because the HP Integrity boot loader uses EFI paths
instead of the hardware paths to locate disks.
The user has multiple options to get to an HP-UX 11i v3 boot disk:
o Switch to nPars mode and modify the primary and alternate boot paths to point to a
disk which has HP-UX 11i v3 (vPars A.05.01) installed on it.
vPar3
HPUX 11i v1
(A.03.05)
vPars monitor
(A.05.03)
nPar
Figure 4: Mixed HP-UX 11i v3-v2-v1 vPars Environment with only 11iv2 and 11iv1 virtual
partitions;
no
configuration
changes are allowed other th
an those supported on self
vPar1
HPUX 11i v1
(A.03.05)
vPar2
HPUX 11i v2
(A.04.05)