HP Instant Capacity User's Guide for Version 9.x

6.1 Instant Capacity Cell Board
6.1.1 Overview
Instant Capacity Cell Board offers a way to have additional (inactive) cell board capacity in your
system for growing business needs. When the need arises, you acquire the necessary usage rights
in order to activate and use the cell boards, which contain memory and processors or cores.
An Instant Capacity cell board is configured at HP manufacturing already assigned to an nPartition
(hard partition) with its use-on-next-boot flag set to n (no), so it does not participate in the
boot of the nPartition.
When you are ready to activate a cell board, you can increase the cell usage rights by either
purchasing the appropriate Right to Use (RTU) products, or by borrowing usage rights if you
are using Global Instant Capacity to share usage rights within a group of servers. To purchase
usage rights, submit a purchase order to HP for the appropriate RTU products to increase the
cell usage rights available on the complex, as well as sufficient usage rights for all of the memory
on the cell board and, depending on the available usage rights and existing complex configuration,
usage rights for one or more additional cores. Then, the cell board is available for activation and
participation in the boot of the nPartition. This is controlled by setting the use-on-next-boot
flag to y (yes) with the parmodify command and rebooting the nPartition.
NOTE: If usage rights for the cell board, its memory, and at least one core are insufficient, the
Instant Capacity software prevents the cell board from being configured to participate (become
active) in the boot of an nPartition.
Any cell board, whether or not usage rights are available for activation, can be assigned to an
nPartition with the use-on-next-boot flag set to n (no).
Because an active cell board must have a minimum of 1 active core, prior to activation of a cell
board one of the following must be true:
• Usage rights for at least one additional core must be available in the complex. There must
be at least one active core per cell board. The Instant Capacity software redistributes active
cores across all cell boards in the partition.
• Usage rights for at least one additional core must be purchased and the RTU codeword must
be applied to the complex.
• If the complex is a member of a Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP) group, usage rights for at
least one additional core must be available from the group.
After a cell board is activated, all of the cores on the cell board can be activated, depending on
the availability of core usage rights. You might need to acquire additional core usage rights in
order to activate additional cores from the newly activated cell board.
For information about assigning and unassigning a cell board to an nPartition, see “Assigning
a Cell to a Partition” (page 65) and “Unassigning a Cell from a Partition” (page 67).
Ask your HP sales representative about availability of the Instant Capacity Cell Board product.
90 Instant Capacity Cell Board