HP Superdome 2 Partitioning Administrator Guide (5900-2540, December 2012)

3 Getting started with nPartitions
HP Superdome 2 with sx3000 processors uses c-Class technology for the architecture of the system.
The HP Superdome 2 is managed by an OA with enhanced firmware. The OA has partitioning
capabilities, both for hard partitions (nPartition) and for virtual partitions (vPar). You can manage
the nPartitions and vPars through the OA without installing the software on any disk. Partitions can
also be managed from the OS's in the partitions (nPartition or vPar). The same set of commands
as in legacy servers can be used to manage partitions on HP Superdome 2 servers.
This chapter addresses the following topics:
• “Administration tool for nPartitions” (page 16)
• “nPartition resources” (page 17)
• “nPartition properties” (page 19)
• “Blade resource attributes” (page 20)
• “Operating system specific default values for nPartition attributes” (page 24)
• “Partition State and RunStates” (page 24)
• “Support for partition discovery at run-time” (page 26)
• “Partition specifications (parspec)” (page 27)
Administration tool for nPartitions
The administration tool for nPartitions is the OA, which provides a graphical user interface and a
command-line interface. This section discusses the following topics:
• “Onboard Partition Manager” (page 16)
• “Commands for configuring nPartitions” (page 16)
Onboard Partition Manager
The Onboard Partition Manager is a set of tools integrated with the HP Superdome 2 Onboard
Administrator. The tools in the Onboard Partition Manager enables you to configure both nPartitions
and virtual partitions. These tools replace the legacy tools for partition configuration (ParMgr for
nPartitions and vparmgr for virtual partitions). The Onboard Partition Manager tools are enhanced
over the previous tools. The OA GUI can be launched either from the OA or from an operating
system instance via the HP System Management Homepage (SMH).
Commands for configuring nPartitions
You can use the nPartition commands within an instance of HP-UX to create, modify, monitor, and
remove nPartitions within the privileges granted via parperm (with the exception of parperm,
which is available only from the OA).
Table 14 lists the nPartition configuration commands.
NOTE: To execute partition commands from the operating system, you must have root user
access.
Table 2 nPartition Commands
DescriptionCommand
Creates a new nPartition. For more information, see help parcreate .parcreate
Displays or changes default values of certain nPartition attributes. For more information, see help
pardefault.
pardefault
16 Getting started with nPartitions