UNIX VIRTUALIZATION.

[Manuales]

Hi, i'd like to know what is "unix virtualization" I mean, now a day we are working with servers hp 9000 unix 11.0, i'd like to know what is the best practice with unix virtualization concept.
I do not nothing about this concept ...

Please let me know.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

Unix virtualization is the running of more than one instance of the OS on on hardware platform.

npar/vpar is the HP product for this.

With HP-UX 11.00, which is PA-RISC only and out of support, you have not virtualization options or best practices.

Best practices would dictate you plan a migration to a supported OS. Then you can purchase a system that is capable of virtualization and be concerned with it.

SEP

[Tim Nelson]

FYI,

Must be at lease hpux 11iv1 for vPars

hpux 11iv2 and on Itanium for IVM

[Geoff Wild]

Have a look at:

http://www.hp.com/go/vse

http://www.hp.com/go/vsera

Rgds...Geoff

[Torsten.]

There are 2 different solution today for hp-ux:

1) Vitual Partitions (aka vPars):
http://docs.hp.com/en/oshpux11iv2.html#Virtual%20Partitions

(hp-ux only)

2) Integrity Virtual Machines (aka HPVM):
http://docs.hp.com/en/oshpux11iv2.html#HP%20Integrity%20Virtual%20Machines

(mixed OS - hp-ux, windows, linux)

[Dave Wherry]

nPars run on cell based systems, both HP9000 and Integrity. Partitions are delineated at the cell. A partition can be a single or multiple cells. For example and rx8640 can have a partition with a single cell board and a second partition with 3 cell boards. Or, any other combination cell board multiples. The advantage to nPars is that it provides electrical isolation between the partitions. A hardware failure in one partition will not affect another partition.

vPars also run on cell based systems. This lets you take for example, a cell with 4 CPUs and make 4 paritions each with 1 CPU. Or, any other combination - 1,3 2,2 ....
vPars can also run inside of nPars.

Integrity Virtual Machines runs on any of the Integrity servers and allows you to create sub CPU partitions. Allocate just a fraction of a CPU to a virtual machine. This is the most flexible of the options.

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

You can start out with a "big box" with a lot of memory and cpu's.

If you want, you can divide this into several nPar's (physically assigned).

Further you can create vPar's.

A vPar require a minimum of 1CPU, 1I/O, a chunk of mem etc., but you can use some floating CPU's which is reassigned either 'on demand', 'during a mcsg failover' or manually.

----
Example setup from part of our landscape:
We have a 'big' Itanium nPar running 4 production SAP systems. Each is a separate mcsg package. We use PRM to control CPU resources between these 4 systems.

The failover server is divided into 3 vPar's, which "during normal operation" run Test systems, Project systems etc.
The vpar which is used as failover node for production, have only 1CPU assigned but can steal several from the other 2 systems on the same physical box.

We can switch a single system or all systems.

The servers is located in 2 different computer rooms. Is attached to 2 different SAN's. Systems write to both sides.
-------------
SuSe Linux, cheaper alternative to HP-UX?
SLES10 offers virtualisation much in the same way as VMware.
The HP-UX way is a high-end, expensive solution while many of the features that was available in such systems only, now is becoming available from opensource communities.

We've just started investigating the virtualisation within SLES, but currently run several SLES servers (some within VMware partitions).

You can use MCSG from HP also for SLES, but there is alternative products as well.

The commitment to SLES seems to grow fast and who knows... Perhaps our next step would be to migrate from HP-UX to this OS.

/Tor-Arne