HP Instant Capacity User's Guide for Versions 8.x

Global Instant Capacity Overview
Global Instant Capacity, or GiCAP, provides HP customers with the flexibility to move usage
rights (RTUs) for Instant Capacity components within a group of servers, and it also provides
“pooled” temporary capacity across the group. This provides more cost-effective high availability,
more adaptable load balancing, and more efficient and easier use of temporary capacity. A GiCAP
Group is managed using the icapmanage command.
GiCAP provides several benefits:
• Cost-effective High Availability. In case of planned or unplanned downtime, you can
transfer usage rights from a failed partition or a failed member complex to one or more other
servers in the group that are providing backup availability. Without GiCAP, the only way
to provide this failover scenario is to provision each server with an adequate amount of
temporary capacity in case of potential failures.
• Load Balancing. To provide adaptability and accommodation of changing demands, usage
rights can be transferred between servers in a group. For example, a server with extra unused
capacity can release usage rights to be used to activate additional components on an
overloaded server that needs extra capacity.
• Pooled Temporary Capacity. Temporary capacity usage rights can be shared across servers
for better efficiency and ease of use. By pooling temporary capacity, there is less need to
provision temporary capacity for each server.
Global Instant Capacity is part of Instant Capacity versions 8.x on HP-UX and OpenVMS systems,
and is enabled by purchasing a special GiCAP Sharing Rights codeword. After purchase, the
codeword can be retrieved from the HP Utility Pricing Solutions web portal, located at:
http://www.hp.com/go/icap/portal. When you retrieve the codeword, you will need to provide
the sales order number for the codeword purchase, the serial number of the Group Manager
system, as well as partition information for the Group Manager. Applying this codeword on a
system running Instant Capacity enables the creation of a GiCAP Group with members.
The following diagram illustrates the process of configuring and using Global Instant Capacity.
98 Global Instant Capacity