Technical data

Virtual Partitions (vPars) Management on nPartitions
Introduction to Managing vPars on nPartitions
HP System Partitions Guide: Administration for nPartitions, rev 5.1 445
vPar Hardware On HP nPartition servers, each Virtual Partition is assigned a subset of
its nPartition’s hardware. Only the active hardware assigned to the local
nPartition can be used by vPars within the nPartition.
Hardware that is assigned to remote nPartitions and hardware that is
inactive cannot be used by vPars in the local nPartition.
Each vPar runs its own instance of HP-UX and has its own dedicated
hardware resources. You can reconfigure vPars and can dynamically
reallocate certain processors among vPars in the local nPartition, but you
cannot share resources across vPars or across nPartitions.
The hardware assigned to each Virtual Partition includes: processors
(CPUs), memory, and input/output busses. Each I/O bus can have a PCI
card installed and devices attached.
Each Virtual Partition should be assigned at least one I/O bus (LBA) that
has a boot device with HP-UX 11i and the vPars software product
installed. An I/O bus with a network interface card also should be
assigned to each vPar to support networking. See vPars Requirements
and Recommendations on page 455 for more details.
vPars Software,
Booting, and
Consoles
Running Virtual Partitions in an nPartition involves installing the
HP-UX Virtual Partitions software product, configuring one or more
vPars, and then booting the vPars monitor (/stand/vpmon) on the
nPartition and loading/booting HP-UX on each of the vPars.
By booting the /stand/vpmon Virtual Partitions monitor instead of the
/stand/vmunix HP-UX kernel, an nPartition provides an additional boot
loader specifically for vPars.
Each nPartition can be configured to automatically boot Virtual
Partitions, and vPars can individually be configured to be booted
manually or automatically. See Procedures for Managing vPars on
HP nPartition Servers on page 473 for details.
Only one vPars monitor is booted per nPartition. All vPars in an
nPartition share the same console device: the nPartition’s console. See
vPar Console and Log Use on nPartition Servers on page 465 for details.
vPars HP-UX 11i
Kernel
The vPars software installation builds a relocatable, vPars-enabled
HP-UX 11i kernel and installs patches, commands, and vpmon to support
the vPars software environment. See Installing and Configuring vPars
on nPartition Servers on page 470 for details.