Introducing HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions

Sep 2007 3
Introduction
Today’s data centers frequently need to be flexible in meeting the demands of new customers and
new projects. Ideally, these demands have to be met in an expedited fashion with minimal overhead
while providing a relatively high level of isolation from other customers and other projects. For most
data centers, the best solution is one that uses current capacity to satisfy these new demands, while
continuing to provide existing customers with the capacity they expect. By doing so, data center
owners can keep total cost of ownership to a minimum while maintaining a high level of
responsiveness to their customers.
To help address this challenge, Hewlett-Packard has created the HP Virtual Server Environment, an
integrated server virtualization offering for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers that provides a flexible
computing environment, maximizing usage of your server resources. The Virtual Server
Environment encompasses a number of fully integrated, complementary components that enhance
the functionality and flexibility of your server environment including workload management, software
availability, partitioning and utility pricing.
HP offers the broadest range of partitioning capabilities as part of the HP Partitioning Continuum.
These capabilities are offered through a combination of hard partitions, soft partitions, and resource
partitions, which can be used together for even greater combined functionality.
This paper introduces HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions (vPars) – soft partitions that are a part of the HP
Partitioning Continuum for HP-UX. Virtual partitions provides granularity at the hardware level (CPU
core, I/O card), with each vPar running its own version of the HP-UX 11i operating system. This is a
sound and cost-efficient approach when applications need fewer resources than in an individual
server or Hard Partition (nPartition), and the applications need to be isolated from one another for
reliability, tuning, or version compatibility of the software stack.
Figure 1: HP Partitioning Continuum for HP-UX
Clusters nPartitions
vPars
HWgranularity
Process
Resource
Manager
Clusters of hard
partitions or
servers
Hard partitions
within a server
complex
Virtual partitions
within a serveror
hard partition
Resource
partitions within
an OS instance
Integrity VMs
HW sharing
Virtual machines
within a serveror
hard partition