Managing Superdome Complexes: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Overview of the Superdome System Environment
Overview of Superdome System Features
Chapter 1 15
HP Superdome Partitions
A new feature of HP Superdome systems is the ability to run multiple
instances of the HP-UX 11i operating system on a single server. This
capability is accomplished by defining multiple partitions within a
Superdome server.
Because partitions are managed through software, you can reconfigure a
server’s partition definitions without physically modifying the server’s
hardware configuration.
See Chapter 4, “Configuring and Managing Superdome Partitions,” on
page 113 for details on performing tasks related to managing and
configuring partitions.
Each partition establishes a subset of a Superdome server’s hardware
resources that are to be used as a system environment for booting a
single instance of HP-UX.
A partition includes all cells assigned to it as well as all I/O chassis
connected to those cells. These cells and I/O chassis are used exclusively
by the partition and are not used by any other partitions in the complex.
All processors, memory, and I/O in a partition are available exclusively to
the software running in the partition. This means that each partition
runs its own private instance of Boot Console Handler (BCH) and
HP-UX.
HP-UX 11i supports static partitions, which provide a fixed set of
hardware resources for running a single operating system.
You can reconfigure partitions to include more, fewer, and/or different
hardware resources, but doing so requires shutting down the operating
system running in the partition, and resetting the partition as part of
reconfiguring it.