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Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

 
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Hemanth Gurunath Basrur
Honored Contributor

HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

Hello ITRC Forum Participants,

The vPars development lab in HP is trying to determine if HP-UX customers need a GUI to manage vPars on HPUX servers and server complexes. The lab needs your feedback in order to make the correct decision. A few moments of your time to answer the following 7 short questions would be greatly appreciated and invaluable:

1. Do you use Virtual partitions (vPars) on a HP-UX server complex? If so, how many vPars and how many servers?


2. The vPars CLI (command-line interface) is on all releases, but HP-UX 11.11 also has a vPars GUI (Graphical User Interface) that can be used. Should a GUI be provided to manage vPars? Is this a want or a must?

3. Which versions should have the GUI and why?

4. Do you prefer a GUI over the CLI? Why or Why not?

5. Which features should be included in the vPars GUI? (What is essential versus what is really nice?)

6. Should the vPars GUI product be standalone or integrated with any of the HP-UX System Management and Virtualization tools like:

a. HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE)?
b. HP System Management Homepage (HP SMH)?

7. What are your primary challenges managing virtual partitions on a HP-UX server complex?

Thanks,
Hemanth
18 REPLIES 18
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor
Solution

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

Shalom,

1) No.
2) Yes, makes it more competitive with windows and Linux Virtualization.
3) Not relevant, theoretical.
4) CLI. GUI should be like sam where we can see the underlying commands and learn the command line.
5) Start/stop/move resources between vpars
6) both
7) Getting people to understand Itanium is a good platform for our customers and interal users.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Vihang.
Trusted Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

Hi Hemanth,

1) Yes, 2 Superdomes with 1 nPar & 3 vPars each. 2 rx8640 servers with 2 nPars with 1 out of the 2 nPars having 2 vPars each.
2) The vPars GUI is very helpful which makes complex tasks easy to execute. But I prefer using the CLI. Im a CLI guy :-D
3) If introduced, I think all versions should have it because users of different versions might need it.
4) I prefer the CLI. Its my personal preference, nothing to do with features.
5) Moving of CPU, Memory, IO cards should be there. Also, we should be able to create new vPars using the GUI.
6)It should be integrated with the System Management Homepage which I think is a very good tool.
7) Challenges used to be memory movement across vPars, which has been taken care in the 11.31 version I suppose.


Regards,
Vihang.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1. NO
2. Yes. Want
3. All supported versions
4. CLI. In general I prefer direct commnads than any interface managmenet tool.
5. All that are available in CLI
6. integrated with both tools.
7. N/A
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1. Up to 8 vPars per nPar on several SD's and midrange systems. Even on a n-class for test.

2. Never needed. AFAIR I need to create at least 1 vPar first and boot it in order to use the GUI - so I stay with the CLI.
IMHO using the CLI is unix style and preferred by most admins.

3. Versions!
Imagine you don't know anything - what is newer? Version 3.05 or 4.02 for example?

To be honest - the current version numbering is IMHO one of the most confusing.

Why not something like

A.11.11.03.05 ???
A.11.23.04.05 ???
A.11.31.05.03 ???

4. CLI - always my first choice.

5. if a GUI, then let it look like the parmgr GUI. It would be essential + nice to find the configured slots on a large complex easily.

6. SMH
(I never used VSE so far, so I don't know it)

7. I configured my first system with version A.02.01 many years ago. This was a challenge. Since this time it is straight forward for me.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

3. maybe much better: a numbering like


A.11.23.08.09 ... september 2008 release



just like the others do, e.g.

FEATURE11i B.11.23.0712.070 Feature Enablement Patches for HP-UX 11i v2, December 2007

HWEnable11i B.11.23.0712.070 Hardware Enablement Patches for HP-UX 11i v2, December 2007

RAID-01 B.11.23.0712 RAID SA; Supptd HW=A7143A/A9890A/A9891A
...

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

__________________________________________________
There are only 10 types of people in the world -
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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No support by private messages. Please ask the forum!

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Olivier Masse
Honored Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1. Yes, 1 complex with 5 vpars

2. Yes. I used to be a regular user of vparmgr in the old days

3. Everytihing starting from Vpar version 5 on 11iv3

4. I prefer a GUI, since as an occasional user this saves me a lot of time when reconfiguring vPars since I don't have to RTFM. :)

5. Anything for basic administration of vPars would be enough. More advanced operations are indeed better servced by a CLI.

6.a) I don't use VSE
6.b) I don't like the SMH-based tools either since they're clunky and dependent on HP-UX's CIM implementation which is not very reliable (at least from my experience). But it looks like they're the new platform for HP-UX GUI tools so I guess it would have to be SMH-based.
Pete Randall
Outstanding Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1. Two vPars on one server.

2. Like Olivier, I used vparmgr to help overcome my unfamiliarity.

3. The latest version and subsequent.

4. I'm more of CLI sort but the GUI can be helpful when you're not used to doing something (how ofter do you make changes to vPars, really?)

5. Keep it simple and straightforward and show the commands behind the pretty interface.

6. Standalone and NOT java/browser based.

7. I don't like virtualization's loss of control. I feel like there's another layer between me and the machine and it makes it confusing. Just booting and not being able to see what's happening gives me ulcers.


Pete

Pete
George_Dodds
Honored Contributor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1) Yes, 3 Superdomes each with 4 nPars & 4 vPars.

2) The GUI does make things easier, especially druning a long nightshift when your brain just needs a little nudge on what to do next.

3) All versions, just to make life simpler.

4) CLI as thats all that was available at my first unix based job, plus i grew up on msdos.

5) CPU, Memory, IO cards modification.

6) I'd prefer standalone, but sometimes an intergrated management tool is better if you have a team of remote admins.

7) Getting everything done efficiently with minimal chance of errors.
Robert Cook_6
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP-UX vPars Development Team Wants Your Feedback

1. We have around 30 Vpars, pa-risc and itanium on 3 superdomes.

2. We use gWLM, global workload manager, which is a plugin to hpsim to manage our vpars. Very nice way to manage the environment.

7. One of the main challenges is getting good capacity and useage data in order to accurately predict when we need more capacity.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthor C Clark