HP-UX Virtual Partitions Administrator's Guide (includes A.05.02)

How vPars and its Components Work
Partitioning Using vPars
Chapter 2
30
Partitioning Using vPars
To understand how vPars works, compare it to a server not using vPars. Figure 2-1 shows a 4-way HP-UX
server. Without vPars, all hardware resources are dedicated to one instance of HP-UX and the applications
that are running on this one instance.
Figure 2-1 Server without vPars
Figure 2-2 shows the software stack where all applications run on top of the single OS instance:
Figure 2-2 Software Stack of Server without vPars
Using vPars, you can allocate a server’s resources into two or more virtual partitions, each with a subset of
the hardware. In Figure 2-3, two virtual partitions are shown, each with its own boot disk, its own processor
resources, its own LAN connection, and a sufficient subset of memory to run HP-UX and the applications
intended to be hosted on that virtual partition.
Processor
0
Processor
1
Processor
2
Processor
3
Host PCI Bridge
4
Host PCI Bridge
5
Memory
6
SCSI
0/0
SCSI
0/0
LAN
1/0
LAN
1/0
6.0
6.0
Application 1
Application 2
HP-UX 11i
Hardware / Firmware