HP-UX 11i June 2001 Release Notes

Chapter 2 33

2 Superdome Systems

Introduction (new at 11i original release)

Hewlett-Packard’s new Superdome systems provide a highly

conﬁgurable, high-performance HP-UX server environment.

A major new feature of Superdome servers is hard partitions. This

capability allows you to conﬁgure a single Superdome server as either

one large systemor as multiple smaller systems.Because hard partitions

are managed through software, you can reconﬁgure a server without

physically modifying the server’s hardware conﬁguration.

As a result, a Superdome system can run multiple instances of the 11i

operating system on a single server. This capability is accomplished by

deﬁning multiple partitions within a Superdome server.

Each partition deﬁnition establishes a subset of a Superdome server’s

hardware resources that are to be used as a system environment for

booting a single instance of HP-UX.

All processors, memory, and I/O in a partition are available exclusively to

the software running in the partition. Thus, each partition runs a single

instance of the ﬁrmware, Boot Console Handler (BCH), and HP-UX.

You can reconﬁgure partitions to include more, fewer, and/or different

hardware resources, but this will require shutting down the operating

system running in the partition and resetting the partition as part of

reconﬁguring it.

For more speciﬁc task-oriented information on the new Superdome

servers, refer to Managing Superdome Complexes: A Guide for HP-UX

System Administrators, part number B2355-90702.