Is anyone else testing Virtual Partitions?

[harry d brown jr]

Hi eveyone. I'm wondering how many people here are doing any testing with Virtual Partitions. I'm personally testing it on an N-class with 6cpu's and 12gb of memory. I'm installing release IC9.2 right now on 11i with the Sept 11i 2001 patches.

thanks,

harry


live free or die

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi
Where planning to do so on my L-class, but found that it required a 3000, so now we're trying to get the money to upgrade.

The test is supposed to check if we can implement new software releases on a server whilst in production on another partition, thus reducing the need for separate servers.

Andreas

[harry d brown jr]

Andreas,

That's a good use, and hopefully you'll get your upgrade soon to start your testing.

harry

live free or die

[Kevin_31]

I've inherited some N classes which have been left partitally configured/tested for this.

I'm gonna need to pick this up and finish getting it working. Can anyone recommend some URL's, keywords to search for, so I can learn about this.

I heard a call was logged with HP and they said there was only one person (in the UK, me thinks) who knows anything about virtual parititioning.

[Kevin_31 · Accepted solution]

sorry, I put that last posting up before doing my own search, which yielded:

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/11i/index.html#Virtual%20Partitions (scroll down to Virtual Parition section if this URL is broken for you), where you'll find

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/T1335-90001/T1335-90001.html

and a few others.

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/otsearch/getfile?id=/hpux/onlinedocs/diag/stm/stm_vpar.htm&searchterms=partition%7cvirtual&queryid=20020109-080126

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/5971-4629/5971-4629_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/5971-4629/00/00/49-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/5971-4629/00/00/49-toc.html&searchterms=partition%7cvirtual&queryid=20020109-080126

Anyway, if there are others that you who are using/testing virual partitions find partiularly helpful, please pass the info on.

cheers,
kevin.cade@dontyaeventhinkofspammingme@napp.co.uk

[Thom Cornwell]

We have purchased the product and are running it on 11i/N4000 16Gb Memory hooked to EMC FC4700 disk farm.

[harry d brown jr]

Kevin,

I've been testing it for almost a year now, although I haven't rolled it out into production, it is an awesome product. With a SAN, I can literally have hundreds of configurations. I can switch development machines into production recovery machines in less than an hour (with a SAN type of storage).

It's so damn easy to configure! It is also STABLE. I haven't had a crash (minus version 6 which was riddled with issues).

The only documentation I have is what was last given me for version 9. I don't have the final version yet (the one in production), but my HP person will be delivering me a copy soon. When I finish my Whitepaper, I'll scrub it for our internal stuff, and post it on the whitepaper site.

live free or die
harry

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

It is free for one CPU partitions from software.hp.com I believe. You start paying when you want a partition of more than one CPU..

If I'm not mistaken...

[Kevin_31]

I'm configuring vPars to run on my N-classes (which is working great, so far).

Except one thing, we have our backup device(DLT SureStore 2/20) connected via fibre to our SAN. I have successfully booted from a SAN disk lun within VParMon, and assigned our backup device hardware path to one vPar.

The problem is once I assign the hardware to one vPar, the others can't see it!

The whole point for us having our backup device on our SAN is so we can backup at Fibre speed to and from all boxes on the SAN and work on the tape drive without having to reboot the boxes which connect to it.

It seems like vPars manuals (the ones I've found anyway) don't address the issue of whether we can/or how to share the hardware path of a fibre connected device between more than one vPar. Is there a patch? Is this unsupported? Will it be supported or patched in future?

cheers,
Kevin

# vparmodify -p vw -a io:0/4/0/0.2.20.255.0
vparmodify: Error: "-a io:0/4/0/0.2.20.255.0": Resource already assigned to anot
her virtual partition.

[harry d brown jr]

Kevin,

Can you post your entire vpar configuration?

Remember that each partition must have its own PATH to the SAN - and this is at the Fibre Channel CARD level (in your case).

If each partition has independent paths to a device, then it is up to the SAN Manager to determine how it is to be used and by whom (zoning).

As to backups, the best policy and practice is to backup your SAN data from the storage and not from the system. If you must backup from a system, then use backup software that allows one system to write to another system's tape drivers.

Your DLT is this path 0/4/0/0.2.20.255.0 , correct?

live free or die
harry

[Edward Carey]

Hi Kevin,

Are you running vPar on production environment??? or you are still in testing mode ???

We are still try to decide whether we should use vPar on our Production server (N4000) and don't know how stable it is...

[harry d brown jr]

Edward,

I've been running it for over a year now, without any failures. Most of my 6 partitions have been running non-stop for over 6 months now. THe ones that have been running less are the partitions where I had to make kernel changes for applications.


live free or die
harry

[Kevin_31]

I'm still testing it. Hope to have it running in production land a bit later this year.

Those evaluating it will find that some of the cooler features which are bounded around in enthusiastic hype aren't actually working yet in this version. What I mean is that the onlyl resource I've found that you're supposed to be able to dynamically move between live (up) vPars is unbound CPU's. I was expecting to be able to do this with disks, memory, etc. The blurb alludes to plans for more in future releases.

A question for harry d brown jr, who looks like the vPar expert (definitely on these forums!):

I've misconfigured my CPU's somehow such that I'm not allowed to add any unbound CPUs:

# vparmodify -p v1 -a cpu::3
vparmodify Error: "-a cpu::3": Total CPUs would exceed configured maximum.

The config file used to create the vPar is simply:

-D /stand/vwpartdb
-p v1
-a cpu::2
-a cpu:::2:4
-a cpu:33
-a cpu:37
-a mem::1024
-a io:0/0
-a io:0/0/2/0.6.0:BOOT
-a io:0/0/2/1.6.0:ALTBOOT
-a io:1/10/0/0
-b /stand/vmunix
-B auto

see attached for the rest of this output from the vparmodify command:

CPU
Bound/
Unbound
=======
2 0

[harry d brown jr]

Kevin,

vparmodify -p v1 -a cpu::3


needs to be:

vparmodify -p v1 -m cpu::3 -m cpu:::3:4

Which will MODIFY the existing constraint of "2 minimum CPU's". And notice we changed the Min and Max at the same time.

Now, you must have at least one unbound CPU available for it to work.

live free or die
harry

[harry d brown jr]

Kevin,

Do me a favor :-) Start a new message if you have any further questions.

thanks,

live free or die
harry