RE: LPAR Question

["Andy Nolen-Parkhouse" <aparkhouse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark,

Yes, you dedicate individual disk controllers, and their associated drives,
to individual partitions.

My recollection is that the base optical drive will be driven by the MFIOP
on your machine, which cannot be shared between partitions.  So yes, you
would need a second optical drive.  Once you have this second drive on its
own controller, this could be shared between partitions.

You will be able to move around your processor power and your memory
dynamically.  Some of your hardware, like a tape drive on a dedicated IOP
can be varied down in one partition and made available to another partition.
Each partition would require its own NIC.

Some documentation is available at:

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/lpar/

Regards,
Andy

> If all of those things you mentioned need to be done, then I would
> definitely go the BP route.  What I was getting at, is that I do not think
> I have any special hardware requirements, unless I cannot share the CD
> drive easily between the partitions.  I do not care about having backup
> for both partitions.  I just want to be able to do something like create a
> second partition and tell it to use xx GB of DASD, xx MB of RAM and xx% of
> CPU.
> 
> Do I have to dedicate disk by partition?  I was assuming I could just draw
> from a common pool of disks?
> 
> Thanks, it sounds like we will go with a BP.  We already have a list of
> local BP's with experience at LPAR configs.
> 
> Mark