HP-UX Virtual Partitions Ordering and Configuration Guide (March 2012)

2 Overview of Virtual Partitions
HP-UX Virtual Partitions (vPars) is a powerful tool that runs multiple instances of the HP-UX 11i
Operating Environment (OE) simultaneously on one server or nPartition, where each virtual partition:
• has its own assigned set of CPU (processing core), memory, and I/O resources (resource
isolation)
• runs its own separate instance of HP-UX with different patch levels (HP-UX kernel isolation)
• hosts its own set of applications in a fully isolated environment (application isolation)
'Well-behaved' applications built on HP-UX 11i are binary compatible to run within HP-UX Virtual
Partitions (vPars) on the same architecture family. No changes, recompilation or re-certification is
necessary. For more information, see (HP-UX 11i Compatibility for HP Integrity and HP 9000
Servers) at: http://h20338.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/downloads/HP-UX_Binary_Compatibility.pdf
2.1 Key Benefits and Features
The key benefits that vPars provides to customers are:
• Better system resource utilization (from typical 20-50% up to 80-90%)
• Flexible and dynamic resource adjustment
• Application isolation
• Server consolidation
vPars provides these benefits via the following features:
• Flexible “carving up”of existing server or nPartition resources into multiple, independent OS
instances per node
• Increased isolation (and uptime) of applications, their OSs and assigned resources (processing
cores, memory and I/O), with individual reconfiguration and reboot of the individual partitions
(not affecting other partitions)
• Dynamic movement of processor resources between virtual partitions (for variable workload
requirements)
• Single processing core granularity per virtual partition
2.2 Advantages of HP-UX vPars
vPars offers:
2.1 Key Benefits and Features 9