Table of Contents
Advertisement
POWER5 systems introduce an enhanced partitioning model available as a hardware
feature.
The Micro-Partitioning model offers a virtualization method of system resources. In POWER5
processor-based systems, physical resources are abstracted into virtual resources that are
available to partitions. This sharing method is the primary feature of this new partitioning
concept and it happens automatically after a initial system setup.
POWER5 Micro-Partitioning specifies processor capacity in processing units. One processing
unit represents 1% of one physical processor. A Micro-partition defined with 220 processing
units is equivalent to the power of 2.2 physical processors. Creating a micro-partition, the
minimum capacity is 10 processing units, or 1/10 of a physical processor. A maximum of 10
micro-partitions for each physical processor can be defined, but on a loaded system the
practicle limit is less.
Micro-partitions can also be defined with the capped and uncapped attributes. A capped
micro-partition is not allowed to exceed the defined share, while an uncapped partition is
allowed to consume additional capacity with fewer restrictions. Uncapped partitions can be
configured to the total idle capacity of the server or a percentage of it. Configuration through
the HMC menus sets the allowed share and the capped or uncapped attribute.
The POWER5 processor-based systems use the POWER Hypervisor, which is the new
active Hypervisor to execute the Micro-partition model. The Hypervisor of existing POWER4
processor-based systems is working on a demand basis, as the result of machine interrupts
and callbacks to the operating system.
The Advanced POWER Virtualization Feature (Virtual I/O Server) described in 2.10.1,
"Advanced POWER Virtualization feature" on page 34, facilitates the understanding of all the
POWER5 and POWER Hypervisor enhancements to reach the highest level of granularity of
installed system resources.
Figure 2-12 shows the Micro-partition LPAR concept.
External
storage
Figure 2-12 Micro-partition LPAR
Micro-Partitioning
network
8 CPUs
2 CPUs 4 CPUs 4 CPUs
Virtual I/O
Server
AIX v5.3
Linux
Virtual
Virtual
SCSI
Adapter
Virtual Ethernet
POWER Hypervisor
I/O
I/O
Storage Network
Sto Net
Chapter 2. Architecture and technical overview
6 CPUs
AIX
AIX
v5.2
v5.3
I/O
I/O
HMC
Sto Net
Sto Net
I/O
S N
33
Advertisement
Table of Contents
