HP-UX Virtual Partitions 6.0 Release Notes

EFI – access via console
In vPars v6.0, you can access the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) of any virtual partition from
its own console. You can modify the EFI environment of a virtual partition from within the EFI shell.
Moreover, this EFI supports the creation of direct boot profiles (dbprofiles) allowing the deployment
of HP-UX via an Ignite server.
CPU and memory – locality aware assignment
In vPars v6.0, the VSP utilizes locality information from the server to assign the best available CPUs
and memory to a virtual partition. The CPUs and memory assigned to a virtual partition are
dedicated to that partition once started, and not sharable with other virtual partitions. The direct
access and locality aware assignment ensures that maximum performance is maintained.
A single virtual partition can be as large as the entire server (CPU, memory, and I/O) minus the
resources reserved for the VSP. The smallest virtual partition that can be created would be a partition
that has a single physical processor core.
I/O – shared
vPars v6.0 provides an efficient shared I/O infrastructure that allows the bandwidth of HBAs and
NICs to be shared amongst a set of vPars to increase the utilization of the HBA or NIC. This
increases the utilization of the HBA or NIC, and solves the I/O slot limitation issues prevalent in
earlier versions of vPars. vPars are assigned virtual NICs that connect to a physical NIC through
a vswitch.
In vPars v6.0, the granularity of I/O assignment is flexible and allows multiple vPars to share the
bandwidth of a physical connection. In earlier versions of vPars, I/O assignment is at the slot
granularity, and all physical connections of a multi-function I/O card are owned by a single vPar.
Other differences
Hardware paths in ioscan output
The hardware paths that are displayed when you perform an ioscan from within a vPar are
different from the hardware paths that are displayed when you perform the ioscan from the VSP.
In earlier versions of vPars software, ioscan displayed a subset of the physical hardware that is
visible from within the vPar. In vPars v6.0, a single virtual blade which scales to the amount of
CPUs and memory allocated to it is displayed. The scalable blade also presents 8 PCI buses to
the vPar regardless of the underlying physical hardware.
vPars database
The consolidated vPars database /stand/vpdb is replaced with individual configuration files for
each vPar, and resides on the VSP.
Configuration file
In an earlier version of vPars commands, the –Z option was used to specify the name of an alternate
and inactive configuration file, which allowed a different partitioning of the server. In vPars v6.0,
instead of using a single configuration file for management, each vPar is managed separately,
and its configuration can be made active or inactive.
6 How does vPars v6.0 differ from its earlier versions