HP-UX Virtual Partitions 6.0 Administrator Guide

increases the flexibility of the HBA or NIC, preserves performance, and solves the I/O slot limitation
issues prevalent in earlier versions of vPars.
In vPars v6.0, the granularity of I/O assignment is flexible and allows multiple vPars to share the
bandwidth of a physical connection. In earlier versions of vPars, I/O assignment is at the slot
granularity, and all physical connections of a multi-function I/O card are owned by a single vPar.
Other differences
Hardware paths in ioscan output
The hardware paths that are displayed when you perform an ioscan from within a vPar are
different from the hardware paths that are displayed when you perform the ioscan from the VSP.
In earlier versions of vPars software, ioscan displayed a subset of the physical hardware that is
visible from within the vPar. In vPars v6.0, a single blade scales to the amount of CPUs and memory
allocated to it. The scalable blade also presents 8 PCI buses to the vPar regardless of the underlying
physical hardware.
vPars database
The consolidated vPars database /stand/vpdb is replaced with individual configuration files for
each vPar, and resides on the VSP.
Configuration file
In an earlier version of the vPars commands, the –Z option was used to specify the name of an
alternate and inactive configuration file, which allowed a different partitioning of the server. In
vPars v6.0, instead of using a single configuration file for management, each vPar is managed
separately, and can be made active or inactive.
How does vPars v6.0 compare/contrast with HP Integrity Virtual Machines
vPars v6.0 has similarities to Integrity VM from the viewpoint that they both allow a subset of a
server’s resources to be grouped to form a virtual server. The resulting virtual server is composed
of CPUs, memory, shared I/O and the HP-UX operating environment.
The main difference between the two products from a configuration perspective is the size and
performance characteristics of the two operating environments (vPars vs VM). The maximum memory
supported on Integrity VM is 128 GB and maximum core count is 16. The maximum memory and
CPU cores supported for vPars v6.0 is equal to the sum of the resources contained in the system
minus those that are used by the VSP. At a minimum, a vPar must contain at least 1 CPU core and
enough memory to support the HP-UX operating environment. Integrity VM on the other hand can
be assigned a fraction of a CPU and enough memory to support HP-UX. Both products use the
same shared I/O drivers but with vPars v6.0, they execute un-virtualized which translates to lower
overhead.
Other features to consider are dynamic CPU migration which allows a vPar to adjust its processing
resources to accommodate changing workload demands. The Integrity VM feature to dynamically
adjust processing resources is called CPU entitlement. The entitlement is the percentage of a physical
CPU that the VM can consume, with 5 percent being the minimum. Integrity VM also supports the
feature automatic memory reallocation (AMR) which allows dynamic adjustment of the VM memory
based on load.
Integrity VM has other features such as online virtual machine migration (OVMM) and support for
OpenVMS that are not available on vPars v6.0. For additional information about HP Integrity
Virtual Machines, see the documentation at: http://www.hp.com/go/hpux-hpvm-docs.
8 Introduction