vPars vs. Virtual machines

[Tim Medford]

I have been running a few integrity VMs for several years on an rx3600 server, hpux 11.23.  We are going though a complete refresh of the environment and upgrading to the latest March 2013 version of hpux on the VSP, and will also be upgrading to Virtual Partitions v6.20.

I am going to re-create the virtual machines from scratch and restore the data.  I have the choice of recreating new virtual machines or using vPars.  I have no experience with vPars and just wondered which is most efficient?

I only have 2-3 virtual machines, and most of the VSP resources are dedicated to 1 of them in particular.  The backing storage for the VSP is on an EVA, and presented through multiple fibre channel cards.  It has about 48gb of memory a 1 dual-core CPU.

Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.

Tim

[Dave Olker]

What kind of server will you be running Integrity VM/vPars v6.2 on?  How big are the VMs you plan on creating in terms of CPU, memory, disk, etc?  Have the VMs been working to your satisfaction or do you require more performance than the VMs have been giving?

Assuming you have sufficient hardware to run vPars v6.2, you will have the option of switching between VMs and vPars witha  single command so you could try running your workload as a VM, shut it down, convert it to a vPar and try running the workload on the same system as a vPar to see the difference in performance.  

Dave

[Tim Medford]

THanks for the reply Dave.  Our setup is pretty simple, the VSP has 48GB of memory.  I am creating 2 VM's on it, the primary VM is allocated 28GB memory and 2 virtual CPUs.  The second VM is a sandbox with 8 gb of memory and 2 CPUs.  We barely need a virtual environment, but this was less cost than buying and supporting 2 physical machines.

I guess I'm just not certain in general of the difference between a vPar and a VM, they seem very similar to me when I read through the documentation.  It is good to know that I can convert back and forth if necessary.

Thanks, Tim

[Dave Olker]

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough in my original question.  When I asked what kind of server you were going to use I meant what model of server.  Only i2 and i4 servers support running vPars v6.2, so bl860/870/890c i2/i4, rx2800 i2/i4 and Superdome 2 i2/i4 servers.  If you're not running one of these systems then you don't have the option of running a v6.2 vPar guest.

Dave

[Tim Medford]

It is a 2007 era rx3600 IA64 server, so sounds like vPar is not an option.  Thanks