Using SAP with HP Virtualization and Partitioning

Figure 1. HP's Partitioning Continuum provides a broad spectrum of solutions for hardware consolidation
Hard Partitions – nPars
With electrical separation, hard partitions are isolated in hardware from each other, so hardware
failures are confined to the partition in which they occur. Applications and operating environments
execute in hard partitions that function as if they were separate physical servers. Moreover, the
majority of hardware upgrades will require that only the affected hard partitions be brought down,
not the entire system. The reconfiguration or rebooting of an individual hard partition does not
require a reboot of the entire system. Hard partitions support multiple operating systems, including
HP-UX 11i, Windows Server 2003®, and Linux®.
Virtual Partitions – vPars
Created by software, each virtual partition runs its own operating-system image and can host its own
applications, offering complete software isolation. Many virtual partitions can run within a hard
partition or on the same physical server. Since processing cores allocated to a virtual partition can be
allocated dynamically without requiring the partition to be rebooted, they offer tremendous flexibility.
Processing cores may be “moved” from one virtual partition to another dynamically, allowing for load
rebalancing to address changing data processing requirements.