Introduction

HP’s new nPartition (hard partition) servers provide highly configurable, high-performance HP-UX system environments.

updated for December 2003

In addition to the servers listed below, HP now supports hard partitions on the following servers:

updated for December 2002

In addition to the servers listed below, HP now supports hard partitions on the HP rp7405 server (model 9000/800/rp7410). The HP rp7405 server is a pre-configured version of the HP rp7410 model.

updated for June 2002

For HP Superdome, rp8400, and rp7410: HP nPartitions servers now support faster PA-8700 processors, including both 750 MHz and 875 MHz CPUs.

updated for March 2002

In addition to the servers listed below, HP now supports hard partitions on the HP rp7410 server (model 9000/800/rp7410).

new at 11i original release

Currently, HP supports hard partitions on the following servers:

The ability to create hard partitions allows you to configure a single nPartition server as either one large system or as multiple smaller systems. Because hard partitions are managed through software, you can reconfigure a server without physically modifying the server’s hardware configuration.

As a result, an nPartition server can run multiple instances of the 11i operating system on a single server. This capability is accomplished by defining multiple partitions within an nPartition server.

Each partition definition establishes a subset of a server’s hardware resources that are to be used as a system environment for booting a single instance of HP-UX.

All processors, memory, and I/O in a partition are available exclusively to the software running in the partition. Thus, each partition runs a single instance of the Boot Console Handler (BCH) interface and HP-UX.

You can reconfigure partitions to include more, fewer, and/or different hardware resources, but this will require shutting down the operating system running in the partition and resetting the partition as part of reconfiguring it.

For details on performing nPartition administration tasks refer to the HP System Partitions Guide, available at http://software.hp.com.