User's Manual

Understanding and Managing Intended Active Values
The Instant Capacity software maintains a value for each nPartition of a complex called intended
active. Fundamentally, the intended active value is the number of cores intended to be active
after a reboot of the nPartition.
The concept and proper manipulation of intended active is critical because:
• It determines the number of cores which will be active upon the boot of an nPartition.
• The value is used to establish the allocation of core usage rights for an nPartition within the
total number of core usage rights purchased for the complex. That is, it represents the
intended distribution of core resources for each nPartition.
When the intended active value changes, the distribution of usage rights across the hard partitions
is changed, and the core resources originally intended for one nPartition might be diverted to
another nPartition. In fact, this is the mechanism that allows for load balancing of resources to
occur. Within a GiCAP group, changes to the intended active value allow resources to be load
balanced across the entire group. Naturally, it is important to be sure that this is an intentional
redistribution of resources.
Note that even inactive nPartitions have an intended active value that represents a “reservation”
of usage rights for that partition. This is necessary to ensure every configured nPartition has core
resources in order to boot.
IMPORTANT: An nPartition that was created but never booted to HP-UX will implicitly reserve
usage rights for all configured cores, regardless of any intended active value set for the nPartition.
Within a virtual partition environment, the intended active value is especially critical because a
value that does not conform to the virtual partition assignments can result in a virtual partition
environment that cannot be booted. For more information see “Boot Time Compliance” (page 66).
In a virtual partition environment, the behavior of the icapmodify -a, -d and -s options is
different when there is unused capacity represented by an intended active value that exceeds
the sum of the cores assigned to the virtual partitions in an nPartition, as described in “Activations
and Deactivations in a Virtual Partition Environment” (page 64).
Understanding and Managing Intended Active Values 63