HP-UX Virtual Partitions 6.0 Administrator Guide

Minimum requirements for a virtual partition
Each virtual partition requires a minimum of:
• One dedicated processing core.
• Sufficient memory to run HP-UX 11i v3 and applications. For the minimum amount of memory
required, see the applicable HP-UX Install and Update Guide for your OS.
• Shared I/O device. This can be a physical disk, logical volume, disk on a SAN via an NPIV
HBA, or others. For more information, see the vparresources3(5) manpage.
• A port on a vswitch.
• Disk space requirement — 4.7 MB for each running guest as the allowance for backing up
configuration files.
For your virtual partitions, use the number of CPUs, amount of memory, and vswitch as is appropriate
for your OS, applications, and network.
Virtual partition names
All virtual partitions must be given text names that can be used by the vPars commands. A vPar
name consists of the following characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, dash (-), underscore (_), and period (.).
At least one of those must be non-numeric (that is, they cannot all be numbers). No other character
is allowed in a vPar name. The maximum length of a vPar name is 255 characters. The virtual
partition name must not start with a dash. If you plan to use the same name for the hostname and
the vPar name, you must be aware that although the underscore (_) is a legal character within the
name of a virtual partition, it is not a legal character within the DNS.
HP recommends using the corresponding host names for virtual partition names, but they are not
internally related.
CPU/Core
Processing resources under vPars, both as input arguments and command outputs, are described
as CPUs. For multi-core processors and dual-core processors, the term CPU is synonymous with
core. The term processor refers to the hardware component that plugs into a processor socket.
Therefore a single processor can have more than one core, and vPars commands will refer to the
separate cores as distinct CPUs.
In vPars v6.0, the boot service processor is chosen automatically, and cannot be migrated.
Memory
Memory is the amount in MB to be assigned to a virtual partition. Memory is assigned on a best
available basis using logical local and ILM memory as appropriate. You must specify enough
memory for your applications and the operating system. If the memory is not specified while creating
the vPar, the default memory assigned to the vPar is 2 GB. The memory size is rounded up to the
unit of allocation which is MB.
I/O
Unlike CPUs and memory which are specified with integral units of count or size, I/O resources
are either directly assigned or are shared among vPars. In the context of shared I/O, this means,
each vPar assigned to a shared resource has equal rights to the bandwidth of the physical HBA
or NIC. For shared I/O, a vPar is assigned a virtual NIC that connects to a physical NIC through
a configured vswitch. It is important to ensure that the aggregate bandwidth requirement of the
sharers does not exceed the bandwidth of the physical device. For example, if 3 vPars share an
8 GB HBA and each vPars has 4 GB peak bandwidth requirement, this can be a viable configuration
if the peak bandwidth needed by the vPars happens at different time and the aggregated bandwidth
12 Planning your system for vPars v6.0