Cost-Effective High-Availability Solutions with HP Instant Capacity on HP-UX

Recovery from a failure involving all nPartitions
When all the nPartitions of a server have failed, the Instant Capacity software cannot contact the
downed server to record or commit changes related to the rights seizure. Due to this, seized usage
rights are only conditionally released to the group and will expire at the end of ten days. If the
downed server does not reconnect to the GiCAP group within those ten days, the seized usage rights
will revert to the downed server automatically and are no longer available to other group members,
which may result in a noncompliant situation on the borrowing server(s) and in the use of additional
TiCAP. This expiration is built in to protect against accidental duplication of usage rights while
enabling customers to get work done in the absence of the failed systems. If you anticipate the server
might be down longer than the default expiration time of 10 days, you need to contact HP before the
expiration time, about extending the time period of the seized rights.
If, however, the downed server does reconnect to the GiCAP group sometime before the end of
the10-day period, the rights seizure is committed just as if the rights seizure had been a normal
deactivation of cores. The following example illustrates this scenario.
Example: Manual failover from a complete outage of nPartitions
Consider the same GiCAP group as shown in Figure 7, except this time there are two critical
applications on Server1; one running in partition db1, and the other running in partition db3. The
application running in db3 requires six active cores, so only six core usage rights were purchased
and allocated to that partition. db4 is running low-priority tasks and has only four active cores.
Temporary capacity is not being used in this group.
In this example, there is a more serious problem and the entire Server 1 has failed. The critical
applications in db1 and db3 must be moved to db2 and db4, respectively. In this case, the system
administrator chooses to seize usage rights from partitions db1 and db3 to free up enough usage
rights to run both applications on Server 2. You must seize usage rights from each nPartition
separately. So to get the maximum usage rights from Server 1, the commands to run on ap1 are:
ap1> icapmanage -x db1
ap1> icapmanage -x db3
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