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

Conﬁguring and Managing Superdome Partitions

Procedures for Managing Partitions

Chapter 4168

Stage 3: Set Cell Attributes

Specify each cell’s “Failure Usage”.

Cells can be included in a partition for several reasons, most notably:

• Performance

• Redundancy (High Availability)

Cells can operate in two modes: normal mode and failure mode. In

normal mode all of the processors and memory in a cell are operating

normally, and participating in the partition’s operations. However, if a

processor or memory DIMM fails during the initialization of a cell (at

boot time or power-on) the cell is placed in failure mode. For performance

reasons, it is not always desirable to have cells in a partition with

differing amounts of memory or processors; that is, it is sometimes better

to have a cell not participate in a partition unless it is 100% functional.

What you are conﬁguring in this step is what happens when a cell in this

partition is in failure mode. You can conﬁgure this for each cell in the

partition. Your choices are:

• Activate the cell (with whatever processors and memory are still

working).

• Do not activate the cell (unless all of its processors and all of its

memory DIMMS are working).

Stage 4: Select Core Cell Choices

Step 6. The cell that is actually used to boot the system is known as the core

cell.

Any cell that is attached to an I/O chassis containing core I/O can qualify

as the core cell. If the partition contains more than one such cell, you

need to specify the order of preference for core cell; PDC (Processor

Dependent Code) will (if possible) select the core cell on this basis during

the boot process. The cell with the I/O chassis attached to it that contains

your primary boot device is the one to designate as the ﬁrst choice. The

Partition Manager will select an appropriate default, and it is usually

okay to accept what it offers.

If you have alternate boot devices (attached to I/O chassis attached to

other cells), you can specify the order in which they will be tried.