Guidelines for Configuring Virtual Partitions on Cellular Platforms

Conclusion

The results from the experiments described in this paper have shown that the vPars software

stack overhead is very minimal. However, due to the NUMA nature of the underlying cellular

hardware platforms and the performance sensitivity of workloads to resource localities it is

important to pay attention to the localities of the resources assigned to the various virtual

partitions within an nPartition. Resource localities in virtual partitions become even more

important as the number of cells in the nPartition increases. Dynamic resource migrations

(triggered either by direct user interaction or via automated tools) done without locality

considerations can over a period of time lead to locality imbalances thereby affecting the

performance of the hosted workload.

Customers are advised to follow the set of general configuration guidelines provided above

and tune their virtual partition configurations (using the rich set of options provided by the

vPars commands) to suit their workload’s performance needs.