The Virtual Partition Environment
The
environment for this scenario is an HP nPartition server. An nPartition
with one cell, four CPUs, and 2GB of memory will host two vPars. See Table 1 for the details of the nPartition.
Table 1. Configuration of nPartition
| nPartition Name | nPartition ID | Num CPUs | Amount Mem | I/O Slots |
|---|
| zoo6 | 6 | 4 | 2 GB | 12 |
Table 5-2. Configuration of Virtual Partitions
| vPar Name | Num Bound CPUs | Max CPUs | Amount Mem | I/O Slots |
|---|
| zoo24 | 1 | 3 | 1 GB | 2 |
| zoo25 | 1 | 3 | 1 GB | 3 |
Within the zoo6
nPartition, two vPars will be created. Each of the vPars will be
assigned one bound CPU. Each vPar will also be assigned 1GB of memory,
a networking interface, and interfaces for two boot devices. This
configuration leaves two unbound CPUs for the purpose of migrating
between the vPars as the workloads demand.
Figure 1 shows the hardware diagram of the zoo6
nPartition. HP nPartition servers have exactly one I/O PCI slot per
LBA. When an LBA is assigned to a vPar, the associated PCI slot, card,
and all devices under the LBA are assigned to the vPar.
The I/O device hardware paths in HP-UX within HP nPartition servers have the following format:
<cell id>/<SBA>/<LBA>/<PCI card specific>
The hardware paths for this nPartition start with 6 because the zoo6
nPartition contains a single cell with an ID of 6. There is a single
system bus adapter (SBA), SBA 0, which yields a zero (0) in the second
field of the hardware paths. Finally, there are 12 LBAs below each SBA.
The LBAs are numbered starting at zero, but they are not numbered
sequentially because of the double-bandwidth (2X) PCI slots. Therefore,
ioscan output should be relied upon to find the hardware paths
associated with each LBA for input to the Virtual Partitions commands.
The core I/O card in slot 6/0/0
contains the console device for the nPartition and a LAN card. This is
the LAN interface that will be used as the primary LAN card for the
zoo24 vPar. The SCSI card in slot 6/0/6 will also be assigned to zoo24. The zoo25 vPar will be assigned the slots 6/0/8, 6/0/9, and 6/0/10,
with the result that the vPar will own a LAN card and two SCSI cards.
In this scenario, there are extra LBAs and I/O cards that not being
used and are not assigned to any virtual partition. These LBAs and I/O
cards can be utilized in the future by assigning the LBA to the vPar
requiring the capabilities.
