Practices for maintaining compliance with iCAP on Superdome 2

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Best practices followed to facilitate iCAP compliance
1. For the greatest flexibility in dynamic movement of usage rights assign all physical cores to
partitions where they are mostly likely to be needed.
2. Upon partition resizing, if the total number of physical cores is less than the number of intended
active cores, we recommend that the partition be adjusted to have the right number of intended
active cores after a reboot.
3. Run icapddaemon on all nPars and vPars in an iCAP system.
4. When transferring usage rights between two partitions, perform deactivation first followed by
activation. Examples are given later in the document.
5. Unless there is an intention to delete a partition, when transferring Usage Rights between two
partitions ensure that there is at least one core usage right left in the partition where usage rights
were deactivated.
6. Only an iCAP blade can contain iCAP memory. Power off an iCAP blade with iCAP memory until
usage rights for the memory are purchased.
a) Purchase iCAP memory Right-To-Use (RTUs) for entire iCAP memory on a blade.
b) Turn on all iCAP memory on an iCAP blade at the same time. Purchase RTUs for the entire
amount of iCAP memory available on the iCAP blade that needs to be turned on.
7. Reboot the partition containing the iCAP blade that is turned on to activate the iCAP memory for
changes to take effect.
8. Add any add-on iCAP memory that is purchased to an iCAP blade that is powered off. Adding an
add-on iCAP memory to an active blade will activate the iCAP memory resulting in non-compliance
of the system.
9. Before temporarily activating cores the purchased TiCAP or IAC must be applied to the correct
server serial number on the HP Utility Pricing Solutions Portal. Details on how to do this is available
in the “Maintaining iCAP Inventory on the HP Utility Pricing Solutions Portal” section. “icapmodify
with “-B” option must be used to set the initial TiCAP balance for a partition. We recommend that
the “-B” option to set TiCAP duration be used only once. It is a good practice to use “icapmodify”
with the “-I” option for all subsequent changes as it takes into account the existing TiCAP balance.
While redistributing TiCAP balance across partitions it is always recommended that the-I” option
is used to first decrease the TiCAP balance on the first partition and then use the same command
to increase the balance on the second partition.
10. By default the iCAP software will send expiration reminder when the TiCAP balance is projected to
expire within 15 days or less. You can use the “icapmodify” command with the “-w” option to
adjust the warning period of TiCAP consumption. You can set the warning period according to the
purpose for which TiCAP has been provisioned. Refer to the script available on
www.hp.com/go/hp-icap-docs to customize the notice period in each partition. Note: In iCAP
version 10.01, the warning period for TiCAP expiration shows as zero instead of 15 days. In
order to avoid any interruption to receipt of warning messages for TiCAP expiration, please use
icapmodify -w number_of_daysbefore using TiCAP in a partition.
11. Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP) sharing rights are purchased for all iCAP cores in the
Environment. Moving Usage Rights across complexes without the purchase of the required number
of GiCAP sharing rights makes the environment non-compliant.
12. Power on all iCAP blades that had iCAP memory and run “icapmodify s 0” on all partitions in
order to make a server fully active. Ensure that sufficient usage rights are available in the partitions
for them to be fully active.