- Introduction
- About Virtual Partitions
- Virtual Partitions Background
- Uses of Virtual Partitions
- Preparing to Create Virtual Partitions
- Loading the Software Required for Virtual Partitions
- Virtual Partitions Command Summary
- Steps to Create Virtual Partitions
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Loading the Software Required for Virtual Partitions
We cover installing Virtual Partitions software in this section. I assume that you already have HP-UX 11i installed on your system or know how to do so.
Keep in mind that HP-UX must be loaded for each Virtual Partition you wish to run. If, for instance, you want to run two Virtual Partitions, as we do in our examples in this book, HP-UX 11i will need to be loaded for both Virtual Partitions. The procedure covered for loading HP-UX 11i needs to be performed for every Virtual Partition you want to run. HP-UX 11i can be loaded from media, such as your HP-UX 11i distribution on a CD-ROM or from an Ignite/UX server. You can use any method to load HP-UX 11i and the Virtual Partitions software for every Virtual Partition you want to run.
At the time of this writing there are two vPars products: a product with the full functionality covered throughout the book and a free product that has a subset of the full product. The free product has a limitation of a maximum of two vPars, and one of the vPars can have only one CPU.
When you buy the full product, product number T1355AC, a CD-ROM is provided that has on it the following components:
- vPars software
- patches
- vPars administration guide
- booklet
- WINSTALL files used for booting
At some point the full product will be on standard distribution rather than a separate CD-ROM. The free product, called VPARSBASE at the time of this writing, can be downloaded from http://www.software.hp.com.
Figure 1-3 shows an example of the software components that appear below the full product T1355AC .
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Figure 1-3 Example of Loading vPars Software
Figure 1-3 shows the three components of which T1355AC is comprised: the kernel, monitor, and run environment. The additional components listed earlier, patches and WINSTALL, will also have to be loaded for vPars to be fully operational.
After loading this software, a reboot takes place to build the kernel. This is done for you automatically; however, vPars kernel-related background is covered in both Chapters 2 and 4 of the vPars book.
All of the vPars software must be loaded on every HP-UX 11i volume that will be used on your vPars server. The loading of this software will take place for every HP-UX 11i instance that you wish to run simultaneously on your vPars server. There are two ways to load the HP-UX 11i operating system and vPars software on all of the volumes used for vPars. The first, which is the method used throughout this book, is to load HP-UX 11i and vPars software on all vPars volumes prior to creating Virtual Partitions. The second is to load only the volume of the first vPar with all software, create as many vPars as you want, and then use vparboot -p vp_name -I ignite_kernel to boot and load HP-UX 11i on the other disks. In this article, I first load HP-UX 11i and vPars software on all disks before creating vPars.
A lot of software has been loaded as a result of loading the vPars software. The /sbin directory has in it the vpar commands we'll use in upcoming sections. The following is a long listing of the vpar commands in /sbin.
# ll /sbin/vpar* -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 128760 Oct 18 22:08 /sbin/vparboot -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 161216 Oct 18 22:07 /sbin/vparcreate -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 101040 Oct 18 22:04 /sbin/vpard -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 59592 Oct 18 22:04 /sbin/vpardump -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 30520 Oct 18 22:04 /sbin/vparextract -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 140072 Oct 18 22:08 /sbin/vparmodify -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 47232 Oct 18 22:04 /sbin/vparreloc -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 127808 Oct 18 22:08 /sbin/vparremove -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 132008 Oct 18 22:08 /sbin/vparreset -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 152040 Oct 18 22:08 /sbin/vparstatus -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 26152 Oct 18 22:04 /sbin/vparutil #
These are the commands that you'll use to create, view, modify, and work with vPars in general. Chapter 2 of the vPars book is devoted to describing these commands and giving examples of using most of them in their various forms. In addition, the tear-out card included with the book summarizes many of these commands.
There are several files in /stand related to the vPars kernel. The following listing shows some of these:
# ll /stand/vp* -rw------- 1 root root 8232 Nov 16 07:09 /stand/vpdb -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 849992 Oct 18 22:02 /stand/vpmon #
vpmon is loaded at the time of system startup and is the basis for running vPars. Chapter 3 of the vPars book covers booting in detail, including bringing up vpmon. vpdb is the vPars database that contains all information related to all of the vPars running on your system. This file is automatically synchronized by the vPars application to ensure that all vPars have the same information about all vPars on your system.
There are several startup-related files, including those shown below, which are covered in more detail in Chapter 8 of the vPars book covering startup.
/etc/rc.config.d/vpard /etc/rc.config.d/vparhb /etc/rc.config.d/vparinit /sbin/init.d/vpard /sbin/init.d/vparhb /sbin/init.d/vparinit
Of particular interest is vparhp, which is the heartbeat daemon related to keeping vpdb synchronized on all of your vPars.
Very important to your work related to vPars are the online man pages. The following listing shows the man pages loaded on my system at the time of this writing.
# man -k vpar
vparboot(1M) - boot a virtual partition
vparcreate(1M) - create a virtual partition
vpardump(1M) - manage monitor dump files
vparextract(1M) - extract memory images from a running virtual
partition system
vparmodify(1M) - modify the attributes of a virtual partition
vparreloc(1M) - relocate the load address of a vmunix file,
determine if a vmunix file is relocatable,
or promote the scope of symbols in a
relocatable vmunix file
vparremove(1M) - remove a virtual partition
vparreset(1M) - reset a virtual partition
vparresources(5) - description of virtual partition resources
and their requirements
vparstatus(1M) - display information about one or more
virtual partitions
vpartition(1) - display information about the Virtual
Partition Command Line Interface
vparutil(1M) - get and set SCSI parameters for SCSI
controllers from a virtual partition
#
Many of these man pages appear in Appendix A of the vPars book.
At this point we have HP-UX 11i and the Virtual Partitions software loaded on the system.