[SunHELP] partitioning in sun

[Francois Dion]

Vipul Bhadra wrote:

>Hi Guys ,
>
>Was just curious as to which SUN servers support hardware based partition
>(Domains i guess) 
>IBM supports virtual (firmware based ) partition , HP supports h/w and
>logical partition. 
>
>Whuch is the entry level server which supports partitions.
>  
>
The type of partitioning you choose really depends on what is the 
intended purpose. If it is for maximum uptime, the only hot swap domains 
if an unexpected  failure happens is on the Sun 4800 and above. HP 
rp7410 will not do it, only I/O cards can be de-allocated and 
hot-swapped. HP rp5470 only supports virtual partitioning. On LPAR 
systems like the IBM P650 or P670, if a cpu is flagged as likely to go 
bad, then you can deallocate the processor before it fails and replace 
it right then. If it does fail before de-allocation or before being 
replaced, then the whole server comes down (and all it's LPARs), since 
the processor still receives interrupts (yes, even after de-allocation).

If you want something like VPAR or LPAR under Sun, you actually dont 
need a machine that does hardware domaining (partitioning). All you need 
is Solaris Express or Solaris 10 (under beta). This even works under 
Intel or AMD processor servers running Solaris for x86. Yes, Solaris x86 
does run on HP and IBM x86 servers too...

Francois