PRM Product Overview

3
Introduction
Traditional IT environments are often silos in which both technology and human resources are aligned
around an application or business function. Capacity is fixed, resources are over-provisioned to meet
peak demand, and systems are complex and difficult to change. Costs are based on owning and
operating the entire vertical infrastructure—even when it is underutilized.
Resource optimization is one of the goals of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy—a strategy for
helping customers synchronize business and IT to capitalize on change. Virtualization is a cornerstone
of the HP approach to helping customers realize the promise of becoming an Adaptive Enterprise. It is
an approach to IT that pools and shares resources so that utilization is optimized and supply
automatically meets demand.
The HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for HP-UX, part of the HP Adaptive Enterprise, has the
broadest range of server virtualization capabilities, including clustering, both for high availability and
high performance, utility pricing technologies such as HP Instant Capacity and HP Pay per use (PPU),
partitioning, resource management, and more.
The VSE provides several forms of partitioning:
• Hard partitions (or nPartitions)—These partitions are implemented through hardware. nPartitions, a
form of hard partitions, are portions of a single server. Each hard partition runs its own instance of
HP-UX.
• Virtual partitions—These partitions are created with software, with each virtual partition running its
own instance of the HP-UX operating system. Virtual partitions can be used within hard partitions.
• Virtual machines—These partitions, much like virtual partitions, are created with software. However,
they emulate generic servers and, therefore, can offer sub-core (sub-CPU) and shared I/O
capabilities. Each virtual machine runs its own operating system. HP Integrity Virtual Machines can
be used within hard partitions.
• Resource partitions—HP Process Resource Manager (PRM), managing processor sets (pSets) or Fair
Share Scheduler (FSS) groups, provides resource partitions. These partitions can be used within (but
not across) hard partitions, virtual partitions, and virtual machines. These partitions run within a
single instance of HP-UX.
HP PRM is an important part of the VSE. It provides resource partitions, enabling you to partition
system resources within a single HP-UX instance. With these partitions in place, you can consolidate
multiple workloads within that HP-UX instance.
This paper provides an overview of HP PRM. It describes benefits and features and provides links for
more detailed information. The paper covers PRM C.03.03.01, which is supported on:
• HP 9000 servers running HP-UX 11i v1 (B.11.11), HP-UX 11i v2 (B.11.23), or HP-UX 11i v3
(B.11.31)
• HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v2 or HP-UX 11i v3 (B.11.31)