HP Superdome 2 Partitioning Administrator Guide (5900-2064, November 2011)

7 Planning Your System for Virtual Partitions
Planning Your Virtual Partitions
A virtual partition is created by specifying the resources needed for the vPar. The resources that
can be assigned to a vPar are:
1. CPU-cores - You must either specify the number of CPU-cores that are part of the vPar, or
specify the resource paths of individual CPU-cores, or specify the socket resource paths and
quantity from where the CPUs are to be assigned.
• CPU-cores specified by Count will be assigned by the system at boot.
• CPU-cores specified by HW path are assigned at configuration time.
• CPU-Cores specified by Socket will have desired sockets assigned at configuration time
but the specific cores in a socket will be assigned by the system at boot.
• If configuring by socket local, then socket-local syntax will be required to configure unless
the system is LORA capable.
• If CPU-cores that had been added by socket-local syntax are to be removed from a vPar
in the DOWN state, then socket-local syntax should also be used for the removal.
• LORA capable systems optimize performance and do not need Socket local configurations.
2. Memory - You must specify the size or specify the socket resource path and size of the memory
to be assigned.
3. I/O - I/O is designated by either its rootport or IO slot resource path. The rootports or IO slots
are nodes where the storage or networking devices are attached.
Before planning virtual partitions, collect the required hardware information about the resources
that can be assigned to vPars. If you have booted HP-UX in the nPar, collect this information, using
the parstatus command either from the OA or the OS by using ioscan. If there is no OS
available, you can boot the nPartition to the UEFI prompt and issue the command info io. Also,
if the nPartition is powered on in vPars mode, you can use vparstatus -A to get the available
vPar assignable resources.
Virtual Partitions Layout Plan
Before you create vPars, you must have a plan of how you want to configure the virtual partitions
within your server. This section lists the following topics:
• “Virtual Partition Names” (page 79)
• “Minimal Hardware Configuration” (page 80)
• “CPU-core” (page 80)
• “Memory” (page 87)
• “I/O” (page 87)
• “Syntax, Rules, and Notes” (page 89)
Virtual Partition Names
A vPar name must have at least one of the following non-numeric characters: a-z, A-Z, dash (-),
underscore (_), or period (.). No other non-numeric characters are allowed in a vPar name. The
maximum length of a vPar name is 254 characters. If the name is not specified either through the
-p or -P options, a default name in the format vParNNNN is given to the vPar.
Although the underscore (_) is a legal character within the name of a vPar, it is not a legal character
within the Domain Name System (DNS), thus making it inappropriate if you wish your vPar names
to match your OS hostnames.
Planning Your Virtual Partitions 79