Using SAP with HP Virtualization and Partitioning

Figure 3. Virtualization Techniques revisited
Now let’s revisit the different virtualization techniques in light of these heuristics, and find the typical
“sweet spots” for the different types of SAP systems.
Dedicated vs. shared resources
• Both nPars and vPars are technologies which provide dedicated resources to the application, as
long as the administrator or workload management tools do not actively change the resource
assignment.
• Both “one OS” (no partitioning at all) and Integrity VM inherently provide resource sharing between
all applications. In both scenarios however workload management tool can take care that various
degrees of resource dedication to applications are implemented.
Isolation
• “one OS” of course provides no isolation at all
• Integrity VM provides OS isolation, but no hardware isolation
• Virtual partitions (vPars) provides a certain degree of HW isolation: the different operating systems
run on a different part of the machine, but when HW changes force you to take down this part of
the machine then all vPars have to be taken down, also faults in some HW components may cause
all vPars to crash
• Hard partitions (nPars) provides perfect HW isolation, with no dependencies whatsoever between
different partitions