N 4000 Partitioning

[Amol Choukekar_1]

Hi,

We are planning to buy a refurbished N 4000 System with 4 * 440 MHz CPU with 4 GB RAM & 4 * 36 GB HDD.

Questions:
1) Can this system be Npartitioned? How many partitions can be made with the above config.
2) Is a seperate Memory Carrier Board required for each partition?
3) Is a seperate LAN Card required for each partition?
4) Can HP-UX 10.20/11.00 installed on one of the partitions if there are two N Partitions?

Please resolve the above queries.

Thanks In Advance.

[Bernhard Mueller]

Hi,

1) NO - you have to use vpars
2) No
3) Yes
4) NO - you need 11i for vpars

Regards,
Bernhard

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Amol,

The first response gives the basic answers, I'll just expand a little.

Only vitual (vPars) are supported of course, but also keep in mind that they act as separate computers & need ALL thir own cards - NIC, SCSI, Fibre Channel, etc. So plan to have enough cards for the partitions. We normally split an N at the busses i.e. one partition has the bus on the left & the other the bus on the right - although you can do it other ways - this seems the most logical to us.

And I also have a question - Where are the 3rd & 4th disks for this system located? The N-class has space for only 2 internal drives in the back. So you must be getting an external enclosure with it as well. So that enclosure needs TWO separate SCSI connections to be available to both partitions. If it only has one - it'll only be usable by one vPar.

HTH,
Jeff

[Alzhy]

Amol, you're only option for partitioning on this rp7400 is via vPars which is licensed per CPU and about $1500 per cpu present. And unfortunately, it is only available at HPUX 11i (11.0 is EOL'd in March, 10.20 is already EOL'd)..

On an N-Class (fully loaded, 8 CPU's and 32 GB of RAM), theorethically you can have up to 8 vPars (a CPU each and memory) but in real world situations you will probably be better off with just 2-4 vPars. vPars require dedicated PCI slots for everything from boot disk, lan and storage.. The most common PCI card is the A5838A - which is a dual SCSI/100BT card. As the N-Class is a 12 PCI Slot system your possible "typical vPar" could include 3 PCI cards/slots each to wit:

1.\ A5838A - for hooking up a SCSI boot disk and 100BT network
2.\ Dual FC HBA - if connecting to a SAN
3.\ Additional PCI - for backups FC or GigEther

So using this "recipe" you could actually have 4 vPars with at 2 CPU's each and memory.. each vPar should be decent development servers, web serving, apps server or small DB server...

[Todd McDaniel_1]

If you only have 4 CPU then you are limited to 2 Vpars... you must have 2 incase you have a failure and you OS will have a small chance of not panicing... With 1 cpu you will crash the box if it fails.

2) the Vpars cannot share any resources. Each must have separate HBAs and NIC, memory, cpu and disk...

3) You must have Lan cards for each instance... they are each a standalone OS.

4) MUST have 11i or later...

Here is the PDF Npar/vpar on docs.hp.com

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/5187-4534.pdf