Planning vPar for production environment

[Manoj P.U.]

Hi Gurus,

We have a plan to split an nPar to two vPars and use those for two production environments.

Is this advisable?
Could you please tell me any where vPars are used in production environments?

My doubts are:
1. What happens if there is any hardware fault with one vPar?
e.g. Memory/CPU/Core I/O and system board.

2. Will this fault affects all the vPars configured?

Thanks in advance
Manoj

[yulianto piyut]

hi,

1. What happens if there is any hardware fault with one vPar?
e.g. Memory/CPU/Core I/O and system board.
---> with hardware that used by one vpat fault, i think there are no affect to another vpar. 1 cell can use by 2 vpar or more, and if this cell is fault, vpar that using this cell will be broken.

I hopes, dont use vpar in production server, use vpar for testing or development server.

-yut-

[Pete Randall]

This is very similar to what we do, though we split an nPar into one development and one production vPar.

The vPars software provides hardware isolation so that a failure in one partition will have no effect on the other.


Pete

[Torsten.]

I have seen a lot of vPars running in production environments without problems.

Most of the times the different vPars are set up in a cluster using different systems (and never only 1 nPar).

Generally speaking, if a hardware failure occurs within a nPar, this could affect all vPars related to this nPar.

[freddy_21]

You can look at this document about vpar.
http://www.docs.hp.com/en/hplex.html#vPars


Could you please tell me any where vPars are used in production environments?
Yes. my customer used vpar. Customer have 8 box RP7420 with vpar to be 22 servers.

My doubts are:
1. What happens if there is any hardware fault with one vPar?
e.g. Memory/CPU/Core I/O and system board.

If hardware problem can make the server down. it's means all the vpar at the server will be down. depend on condition the hardware failure.

Yes you need downtime for repair the hardware problem. but what different with NPAR? you need downtime too?

But vpar can manage your CPU, Memory and I/O well.

You can move resource from one vpar to another vpar. for CPU you can do without restart the server. but for memory you need restart. With NPAR you configuration depend about cellboard and contain for the cellboard.


thanks
freddy

[Manoj P.U.]

Hi all,

Thanks for your response.
I have one more doubt.
Is the 'vPar monitor'created in the 1st vPar common for all other vPars?


Best Regards
Manoj

[Torsten.]

The manual has all details about this.

The function of the monitor is to enable the communication between the vPars and "route" the hardware to the partition.

For this reason you first boot the monitor, e.g.

ISL> hpux /stand/vpmon

Once the monitor is booted, you can boot the different OS kernels.

[Chan 007]

Manoj,

You have already good advice from few, I am just adding to it for your confidence.

We do have vpars and have 2 envs of Prod running on it, aslo many specially many of out DR also running on vpars to reduce the cost & space overhead.

If any company see it from fast ROI prespective they will stick to vpars.

Chan

[Manoj P.U.]

Thanks to all for the quick response.

Best regards
Manoj