Technical data

Online Add and Replacement (OLAR) of PCI Cards
PCI Card OLAR Considerations
HP System Partitions Guide: Administration for nPartitions, rev 5.1 376
PCI Card OLAR Considerations
This section discusses two issues of possible concern when performing
PCI card OLAR tasks: card slot power domains, and multi-function
cards.
Power Domains
Each power domain consists of all the PCI card slots that are powered
on or off together as a unit.
On HP nPartition servers each slot is in its own power domain, which
allows each slot to power on or off without affecting any other slots.
Both SAM’s and Partition Manager’s OLAR procedures automatically
check the effects of OLAR operations on the slots in a power domain.
However, in all nPartition servers each slot’s power is independent.
To list all slots in a power domain, use the rad -a slot command. For
example, the following rad command output indicates that slot 0-1-3-5 is
in its own power domain.
# rad -a 0-1-3-5
0-1-3-5
#
Multi-Function Cards
A multi-function card provides more than one function in a single PCI
card that occupies one slot. For example: a dual-SCSI PCI card has two
SCSI ports, and a combination SCSI/LAN PCI card has both a SCSI port
and a LAN port. Such cards allow a single PCI card slot to provide
services that otherwise would require two or more PCI cards.
A multi-function card has a separate hardware path for each function,
and has a separate driver bound at each hardware path.
Both SAM’s and Partition Manager’s OLAR procedures automatically
check for critical resources at all hardware paths of multi-function cards.
These utilities also suspend and resume all drivers bound to
multi-function cards as required for OLAR purposes.