Migrating VPAR to NPAR

[Douglass Anderson]

I have a rp7420 with HP-UX 11i V1.
I have two VPARs and all is fine.

Is there documentation on how to convert this into a 2 NPAR system and not use VPARs?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

I don't know your reason for this, but it is possible.
With some luck the boot disk path are on the different npars. Just boot /stand/vmunix instead of /stand/vpmon.
If you need to relocate the disk, adjust the pathes in LVM -lm mode and vgexport/vgimport your boot disks to reflect the path change.

[Douglass Anderson]

Yes, The disk and other associated hardware are split for what NPAR we could use.

[Tim Nelson]

Mr. Anderson.....

Somehow missed the post.

There would be no conversion. You would need to rebuild the servers from scratch. With a bunch of prep work you may be able to export the data volumes and then re-import them. Beware that all the HW addresses will change as well as the FC assignments to the Npar. Big task to tackle.

( if this is in relation to the vrm failures, I would doubt that this would help as the vrms seem to be the biggest single point of faiure in HPs cell based systems ).

BTW, you would also loose the ability with workload manager to dynamically swap CPUs back and forth between vpars. There may also be an issue with ICOD depending on where the ICOD processors are located and in which cell ).

Best of luck.

Tim

[Torsten.]

My opinion is slightly different.

Device files are changing only, if you connect cables to different ports or cards or if you move HBAs around.

Let me assume you have a box with 2 cells (easy case) and 2 IO cages.

You can create 2 npars, each using 1 cell and 1 IO.

On a well configured vPar each vPar will use 1 path to a disk from each IO cage.
So every nPar should still have access to at least 1 disk.
Perhaps you need to adjust pathes you moved around.

But anyway, why you want to "convert" your vPars back to only nPars?

[Douglass Anderson]

We have had two failures due to VRM (voltage regulator modules) and the failures brought down both VPARs since they are both on one NPAR. We were thinking to move to 2 NPAR and no VPARs and therefore on VRM failure would only drop one server/ app not both.

[Douglass Anderson]

According to my HP the HW paths would not change, but migration would still be problematic due to the maintenence window allow. We will migrate off the RP7420 to RP4440.