HP Instant Capacity Version 10.x User Guide (762794-001, March 2014)

6 iCAP cell board
This chapter covers the following topics:
• “iCAP cell board” (page 62)
• “Ordering iCAP cell board” (page 63)
• “HP-UX and OpenVMS license and support” (page 63)
• “Acquiring usage rights for iCAP cell board” (page 63)
• “iCAP cell board and considerations of core usage rights” (page 64)
• “Activation of an iCAP cell board” (page 65)
• “Accidental activation of an iCAP cell board” (page 65)
• “iCAP cell board activation exception error” (page 66)
• “iCAP cell board and TiCAP” (page 66)
iCAP cell board
Overview
iCAP Cell Board offers a way to have additional (inactive) cell board capacity in your system for
growing business needs. When the need arises, you acquire the necessary usage rights to activate
and use the cell boards, which contain memory and processors or cores.
An iCAP cell board is configured at HP manufacturing already assigned to an nPartition (hard
partition) with its use-on-next-boot flag set to n (no), so it does not participate in the boot of the
nPartition.
When you are ready to activate a cell board, you can increase the cell usage rights by either
purchasing the appropriate Right to Use (RTU) products, or by borrowing usage rights if you are
using GiCAP to share usage rights within a group of servers. To purchase usage rights, submit a
purchase order to HP for the appropriate RTU products to increase the cell usage rights available
on the complex, sufficient usage rights for all of the memory on the cell board and, depending on
the available usage rights and existing complex configuration, usage rights for one or more
additional cores. Then, the cell board is available for activation and participation in the boot of
the nPartition. This is controlled by setting the use-on-next-boot flag to y (yes) with the parmodify
command and rebooting the nPartition.
NOTE: If usage rights for the cell board, its memory, and at least one core are insufficient, the
iCAP software prevents the cell board from being configured to participate (become active) in the
boot of an nPartition.
Any cell board, whether or not usage rights are available for activation, can be assigned to an
nPartition with the use-on-next-boot flag set to n (no).
Because an active cell board must have a minimum of 1 active core, prior to activation of a cell
board one of the following must be true:
• Usage rights for at least one additional core must be available in the complex. There must be
at least one active core per cell board. The iCAP software redistributes active cores across all
cell boards in the partition.
• Usage rights for at least one additional core must be purchased and the RTU codeword must
be applied to the complex.
• If the complex is a member of a GiCAP group, usage rights for at least one additional core
must be available from the group.
62 iCAP cell board