Introducing HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions

Sep 2007 7
More flexibility and capacity
HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions enables greater flexibility in configuring servers. Consider again
businesses having applications that are cyclic in nature such as, payroll, end of month billing etc.
Many times, the cycles for the applications are not aligned. Normally, servers need to be configured
to handle peak loads which can lead to poor utilization. With vPars, applications can manage the
peak loads effectively, i.e., larger percentage of the system resources during the peak usage times,
and utilizes less resources during off-peak times. This frees up hardware resources that can be
assigned to other vPars where the applications may be experiencing a high demand for these
resources.
In addition, one of the inherent problems in a single system is the difficulty in expanding CPU and
memory resources when the demands of the application, or multiple applications, exceed the
server’s configuration. Usually the system would need to be shut down and additional CPUs and/or
memory added. vPars CPU cores or memory can, however, be dynamically moved from one vPar
to another, without bringing the system down, through vPars commands. In addition, vPars CPU
cores can be moved automatically using HP-UX Workload Manager, allowing CPU resources to be
moved to vPars with the greatest workloads, or removed from vPars when they are no longer
required.
To enable activation of CPU cores on demand, vPars is also integrated with the iCAP (Instant
Capacity on Demand) product from HP.
Rapid deployment of new environments
HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions’ flexibility is complemented by its ability to rapidly deploy a new virtual
server. Instead of purchasing new servers for new projects, unused server resources can be
utilized to create additional vPars housing new environments. This eliminates expensive and time-
consuming server acquisitions for new deployments.
Users with privileged access can create, deploy, monitor, and perform overall virtual partition
management from another vPar. Replication of the OE and application environments from one vPar
to another is simplified through Ignite/UX.
In addition, virtual partitions enable SMP software development and testing of multiple
configurations of virtual SMP servers – all on one host server. Conversely, prototyping and capacity
testing of distributed applications is accommodated by using multiple virtual partitions on a single
nPartition or physical server. HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions can also be used to set up isolated
partitions as test environments. This could be for new revisions of current applications or for
deployment of new applications. vPars also allows testing on the exact deployment environment.
This improves the quality of the test without incurring the costs of replicating the deployment
environment.
Improved system availability
In traditional server environments, all CPUs within a server run the same OS instance and one or
more applications. Application and OS failures may affect the entire server.
With HP-UX 11i Virtual Partitions, however, each virtual partition houses completely separate
operating system instances isolated by software. The vPar monitor is a thin layer of software that
sits logically between the hardware and each OS, allowing each partition to support a different
instance of HP-UX 11i. Each vPar is given its own CPU, memory, and I/O resources. Once a vPar
OS is booted, monitor seldom interferes in the normal operation of the OS.
For improved single system availability, you can run one application per virtual partition. When an
application software failure does occur in one of the vPars, that application may be lost, but the
applications on other vPars continue to run. In fact, even if the OS panics in one of the vPars,
applications running on the other vPars are not affected. In this way, running HP-UX 11i Virtual
Partitions limits the impact of an application or OS failure on overall system availability.