HP Instant Capacity Version 10.x User Guide (5900-1581, March 2011)

standby status. Be aware that doing this loses all database changes made on the demoted Group
Manager during the time that the group was split. There is no method to merge the two databases,
and in particular any new sharing rights applied to the Group Manager designated now as standby
are lost.
Upgrades and Global Instant Capacity
Be careful before upgrading or changing hardware or operating systems for any member of a
GiCAP group. If a member of a GiCAP group changes hardware in such a way that the hardware
is no longer compatible with the group, then the group is considered to be out of compliance and
group functions are restricted.
Also, the number of available sharing rights is adjusted whenever an Instant Capacity codeword
is applied to a GiCAP member system that modifies the number of cores without usage rights on
that member. (RTU and AddOn codewords for cores cause such adjustments.)
If more sharing rights are in use than were purchased for the Group Manager, all groups managed
by that Group Manager are out of compliance and all group functions are restricted until the
problem is resolved. The problem can be resolved by purchasing and applying additional sharing
rights to the Group Manager, purchasing and applying core usage rights to one or more group
members, or removing one or more group members from their group.
When such an incompatibility is detected, the GiCAP Group Manager sends email to the local
root account and to the registered contact email address for each member of the group.
Adding New Partitions
When reconfiguring a member system by adding or deleting an nPartition, use the icapmanage
-u command to add or remove host names to or from the member. For example, enter this command
to add a new nPartition with hostname hostC to member memberA:
icapmanage -u -m memberA -h hostC
To remove a host name, prefix the host name with “!”, as in !hostC. You can also add or remove
a list of hosts; separate the additions from the removals with a “!”, as in
hostA,hostB!hostC,hostD to add hostA and hostB while removing hostC and hostD.
If the Group Manager runs on a partitionable system, changing the configuration of the partitions
may render the Group Manager inoperative. This is because the Group Manager database is tied
to the serial number of the complex, the nPartition ID number, and a virtual partition ID number.
Although adding or modifying partitions does not change these IDs, they are changed if a partition
is deleted and then re-created on the Group Manager.
Rights Seizure
GiCAP disaster recovery was introduced in Instant Capacity version 8.02.01 and provides the
ability to “seize” core usage rights from a GiCAP member that is off line because of some disaster,
and transfer them to the Group Manager. Then, using normal activation commands, these usage
rights can be used to activate additional processor cores on other group members to increase
capacity. Rights seizure can be used to provide disaster recovery when all partitions of a GiCAP
member fail. It also enables the restoration of usage rights to the member once contact has been
restored.
When a failure occurs on a partition in an active group member, use the icapmanage -x
command to acquire core usage rights from the specified host to make them available to other
group members. This is known as rights seizure. The specified host must be known to the GiCAP
Group Manager (it appears in the output of the icapmanage -s command) and not currently
running. That and any other (vPar) hosts associated with the same hard partition are verified to be
unreachable by the GiCAP Group Manager. The icapmanage -x command verifies with each
known host on the hard partition. The hard partition containing the specified host is left with one
Upgrades and Global Instant Capacity 83