HP Instant Capacity User's Guide for Versions 8.x
Instant Capacity Cell Board
Overview
Instant Capacity Cell Board offers you 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/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 Right to Use (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 insufficient usage rights exist for the cell board, its memory, and at least one core, the
Instant Capacity software prevents it from being configured to participate (become active) in the
boot of an nPartition.
Any cell board, whether usage rights are available for activation or not, 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 one 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 will redistribute
active cores across all cell boards in the partition.
• Usage rights for at least one additional core must be purchased and the RTU codeword
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 has been activated, all of the cores on the cell board are potentially activatable,
depending on the availability of core usage rights. You may need to acquire additional core usage
rights in order to activate additional cores from the newly activated cell board.
See “Assigning a Cell to a Partition” (page 65) and “Unassigning a Cell from a Partition” (page 67)
for information on assigning and unassigning a cell board to an nPartition.
IMPORTANT: An active cell board must have a minimum of one active core.
Check with your HP sales representative for availability of the Instant Capacity Cell Board
product.
88 Instant Capacity Cell Board