I/O Allocation

When you are planning your I/O to virtual partition assignments, note that only one virtual partition may own any hardware at or below the LBA (Local Bus Adapter) level. In other words, hardware at or below the LBA level must be in the same partition.

For example, looking at the ioscan output of a rp7400/N4000, the two internal disk slots use the same LBA:

0/0       ba              Local PCI Bus Adapter (782)
0/0/2/0       ext_bus     SCSI C875 Ultra Wide Single-Ended
0/0/2/1       ext_bus     SCSI C875 Ultra Wide Single-Ended

Therefore, you cannot assign one of the internal disks to partition vpar1 and the other internal disk to partition vpar2; these disks must reside in the same partition.

Except when specifying boot disks, hardware resources should be assigned at the LBA level. Boot disks are specified using the full hardware path.

For example, in this example vparcreate command

#vparcreate -p vpar1 -a cpu::1 -a cpu:::1 -a mem::640 -a io:0.0 -a io:0.0.2.0.6.0:BOOT

the I/O assignment is specified using LBA level (-a io:0.0) and the boot disk is specified using the full hardware path (-a io:0.0.2.0.6.0).

Check your hardware manual to verify that your mass storage unit can be used as a bootable device. If a mass storage unit cannot be used as a boot disk on a non-vPars server, it cannot be used as a boot disk on a vPars server.

You can add or delete I/O LBA paths to or from a virtual partition only when the partition is down.

You can change the attributes of an I/O path only when the virtual partition is down.

For information on supported I/O interfaces and configurations, see the document HP-UX Virtual Partitions Ordering and Configuration Guide, available at: