WLM and partitions

Hard partitions

These partitions are electronically isolated through hardware separation. One such partition is a complete server, which can be clustered in an HP Serviceguard high availability cluster. The other type of hard partition, called nPartition, is a portion of a single server. For example, nPartitions are available on Superdome and Keystone servers, which can support up to 16 nPartitions on one server node with cell-based hardware isolation and complete software isolation (each nPartition runs its own copy of HP-UX). The isolation guarantees that an application running in one nPartition is not affected by an application or hardware failure in another nPartition.

Virtual partitions

HP virtual partitions, which are implemented in software, offer a unique granularity of partitioning for servers. You can create virtual partitions consisting of one or more cores. Each virtual partition runs its own instance of the HP-UX operating system. Complete software isolation is provided between virtual partitions. Virtual partitions can be used within hard partitions.

Virtual machines

These partitions, much like virtual partitions, are created with software. However, they emulate generic servers, and therefore can offer sub-core and shared I/O capabilities. Each virtual machine runs its own operating system. HP Integriy Virtual Machines can be used within hard partitions.

Resource partitions

These partitions are provided by the HP Process Resource Manager (PRM) for managing PSETs or FSS groups. Granularity is defined either by whole cores (by PSETs) or a percentage of a number of cores (by FSS groups). Resource partitions enable you to partition system resources (including memory and disk bandwidth) within a single instance of HP-UX and consolidate multiple workloads within that instance. PRM can be used within, but not across, hard partitions and virtual partitions.