HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90011, September 2010)

Pay per use (PPU)
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Pay per use (PPU) is a product that enables you to “pay as you go”. Pay per use is a pricing
model in which you are charged for your actual usage of computing resources.
Technology Summary
With Pay per use, you treat computer processing capacity as you would electricity, water, or
other utilities. You acquire a specific hardware platform with a number of cores and are charged
for the actual usage based on one of the following HP contractual agreements:
• Core percent utilization (percent core)
• Number of active cores (active core)
Tools to Administer/Configure
The Pay per use program uses a dedicated system known as the Utility Meter that is set up by
HP.
For servers you plan to use with Pay per use, you must set up a software agent (the PPU Agent)
on every partition (both hardware and software partitions). The PPU Agent reports usage
information to the Utility Meter which in turn communicates to HP your actual usage.
A single Utility Meter can service up to 100 servers or partitions running HP-UX 11i or Windows
Server 2003.
Most of the configuration of the Pay per use components is done through the ppuconfig
command. ppuconfig can:
• Display current settings
• Test communications to HP
• Set usage caps
• Specify hostnames and system identifiers for use in reporting usage to HP and for your use
when viewing usage information on the portal
• Specify which utility meter a server or partition should use to report its usage information
How to Obtain
Pay per use is shipped with the HP-UX Foundation Operating Environment and is customer
configurable on all HP-UX servers. However, you must enable the Pay per use system to
communicate with a Utility Meter (a special system which must be set up by HP). A single Utility
Meter can support multiple Pay per use systems (currently up to 100), so you do not need a
Utility Meter system for every Pay per use system.
Load Balancing (One Multiple Core Server, One Operating System Instance) 29