HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview

On HP 9000 servers, you can also have multiple versions of HP-UX (or other supported
operating systems) installed on different disks (or logical boot volumes) and select your
desired boot volume at boot time.
NOTE: This multiple boot capability works equally well for servers with more than
one active core. It is presented here because this is an available function for servers
containing only one active core.
Partitioning (Multiple Operating Systems, One Multi-processor Server)
When you have multiple cores available, more virtualization possibilities become
available as well. This area of virtualization technology is known as partitioning. There
are several types of partitioning available on HP systems, but they fall into two major
categories—hardware partitioning and software partitioning.
Hardware Partitioning
nPartition 1 nPartition 2
Hardware partitioning is accomplished at the cell board level, using an HP technology
called nPartitions.
Implemented on servers (Integrity and PA-RISC) that support multiple cell boards,
hardware partitioning isolates (both logically and electrically) multiple operating system
instances. That is, cell boards, cores, I/O cards, and memory assigned to one hardware
partition are available only to the operating system running in that partition.
Should problems occur with an operating system, software, or even hardware in one
partition, operating systems and software running in other partitions are unaffected.
Key Features of Hardware Partitioning Important features of hardware partitioning
include:
38 HP-UX Virtualization Technologies