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

a. Blades and Iobays are the nPar assignable resources. At the time of nPar activation only
the health of the blades and iobays are considered. (Exception failure_usage policy).
b. CPU cores, memory and Root Ports (RPs) are the vPar assignable resources. At the time
of vPar activation, the health of CPU cores and RPs are considered.
2. Non-partitionable resources
a. Partitioning subsystem does not keep track of the health of the non-partitionable resources
like xfm (cross-bar), GPSM, fans and so on.
b. If a cross-bar is deconfigured, then partitions may not be activated. However, the
partitioning subsystem will not be able to give any additional information for this case.
3. Health is hierarchical
a. The health of the resources is hierarchical. And the hierarchy is as seen in the resource
path. If a blade is deconfigured, then all the resources under the blade are considered
as deconfigured for activation.
b. There is one exception. Enclosure health is not taken into consideration in the hierarchical
health.
4. Deconfigured resources are excluded
a. If a resource is deconfigured (including parent deconfigured), then the resource will not
be activated. It will be excluded from the list of resources that are passed to the
downstream firmware components by the Partitioning subsystem while requesting
activation.
b. If a resource is currently deconfigured, but it got acquitted back in HR, then that is a
healthy resource. Partitioning subsystem will mark the resource as healthy and will proceed
with activating it.
5. Indicted resources are included
a. Indicted resources are considered as healthy resources for activation.
b. However, an nPar can be marked “degraded” if it owns any indicted resources apart
from the deconfigured resources.
6. Deconfig failure usage policy
a. If a blade or iobay is deconfigured, then that blade or iobay is not activated.
b. By default, if a blade or iobay has some child resources that are deconfigured, then blade
or iobay is activated and all the healthy sub-blade or iobay resources are activated.
c. If the failure usage attribute of a blade or iobay is set to “deconfig”, and if the blade or
iobay has some deconfigured child resources, then the blade or iobay is excluded from
the list of nPar resources for activation. This is to keep the blade or iobay offline for
servicing.
7. Activation versus reboot
a. The policies used are same for first boot (activation) and reboot (re-activation).
b. During partition reboot, Partitioning subsystem tries to re-activate the partition with the
same set of resources. However, if one or more of the resources is not healthy, then the
partition reboot is internally translated into deactivation and then activation with the
healthy set of resources.
78 Booting and resetting Partitions (nPartitions and vPars)