Increasing Flexibility by Mixing Minor Release of Virtual Partitions

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HP-UX Virtual Partitions Overview
vPars allows the system administrator to create independent HP-UX operating environments from
hardware resources in a system or hard partition. Each of the HP-UX operating environments can be
tuned specifically for the applications that will be hosted.
A virtual partition is composed of one or more CPUs, memory, I/O devices for mass storage, and
network interfaces. The minimum amount of memory necessary to boot a virtual partition is based
on the minimum required by the operating system version and is also a function of the number and
type of I/O resources it owns. Refer the corresponding HP-UX Release Notes for detailed
restrictions. All the resources of each virtual partition are specified in a partition plan called the
vPars database that resides on the boot disk of each virtual partition. The vPar commands
vparcreate and vparmodify are used to create, add, delete, and modify resource assignments in the
partition plan. Each virtual partition should be configured with enough I/O and memory to sustain
the peak workload that will be placed on it. The CPUs on the other hand can be configured to
handle steady state and peak workload conditions by using the CPU migration facilities of vPars.
Starting with HP-UX 11i v3, memory can also be dynamically configured using the online memory
migration feature of vPars. Refer the Configuring and Migrating Memory on vPars white paper for
details on the memory migration feature.
The vPars product has three separate release streams for the three different HP-UX releases
supported. vPars A.03.xx is supported on HP-UX 11i v1 (11.11), A.04.xx is supported on HP-UX
11i v2 (11.23), and A.05.xx is supported on HP-UX 11i v3 (11.31). Note that each vPars release
stream will not install on any HP-UX release other than its supported HP-UX release.