Introduction (new)

Hewlett-Packard's new Superdome systems provide a highly configurable, high-performance HP-UX server environment.

A major new feature of Superdome servers is partitions. This capability allows you to configure a single Superdome server as either one large system or as multiple smaller systems. Because partitions are managed through software, you can reconfigure a server without physically modifying the server's hardware configuration.

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

Each partition definition establishes a subset of a Superdome 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 firmware, Boot Console Handler (BCH), 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 more specific task-oriented information on the new Superdome servers, refer to Managing Superdome Complexes: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators, part number B2355-90702.