HP Instant Capacity (iCAP) manual Understanding and Managing Intended Active Values

Understanding and Managing Intended Active Values

The Instant Capacity software maintains a value for each nPartition of a complex called intended active. Fundamentally, the intended active value is the number of cores intended to be active after a reboot of the nPartition.

The concept and proper manipulation of intended active is critical because:

•It determines the number of cores which will be active upon the boot of an nPartition.

•The value is used to establish the allocation of core usage rights for an nPartition within the total number of core usage rights purchased for the complex. That is, it represents the intended distribution of core resources for each nPartition.

When the intended active value changes, the distribution of usage rights across the hard partitions is changed, and the core resources originally intended for one nPartition might be diverted to another nPartition. In fact, this is the mechanism that allows for load balancing of resources to occur. Within a GiCAP group, changes to the intended active value allow resources to be load balanced across the entire group. Naturally, it is important to be sure that this is an intentional redistribution of resources.

Note that even inactive nPartitions have an intended active value that represents a “reservation” of usage rights for that partition. This is necessary to ensure every configured nPartition has core resources in order to boot.

IMPORTANT: An nPartition that was created but never booted to HP-UX will implicitly reserve usage rights for all configured cores, regardless of any intended active value set for the nPartition.

Within a virtual partition environment, the intended active value is especially critical because a value that does not conform to the virtual partition assignments can result in a virtual partition environment that cannot be booted. For more information see “Boot Time Compliance” (page 66).

In a virtual partition environment, the behavior of the icapmodify -a, -dand -soptions is different when there is unused capacity represented by an intended active value that exceeds the sum of the cores assigned to the virtual partitions in an nPartition, as described in “Activations and Deactivations in a Virtual Partition Environment” (page 64).

Understanding and Managing Intended Active Values 63