Re: New system with Guested Lpar

Wilt, Charles wrote:

pete massiello wrote:

<<SNIP>> gives people a great way to test out a new version of the
OS. One drawback is that the HostING partition becomes like a
Primary partition to the HostED partition.

That being the case, do you think it'd be wise to consider going back
to the old recommendation that your primary (HostING) partition, not
be doing any production work? That the HostING partition's only job
be to host the partitions where the real work is occurring>?

That would be prudent, *if* the hosted partitions will be used in a manner that mimics typical use of the more thoroughly separated [and more likely permanent] Logical Partitions. However I would expect that most hosted /i/ partitions would typically be used in ways that will eliminate most concerns for the impact of an IPL of the primary. That is, hosted partitions will probably be used for various testing, whereby each hosted partition is considered a _temporary_ [non-production] test environment. A hosted partition is unlikely for instance, to be the target of continuous updates to maintain an up-to-date image of the primary or another hosted partition, in order to maintain a somewhat permanent testbed.

Consider there is a new release of a product that will be installed next month to the non-partitioned production system. Without having to have a LPar and the hardware to support it, a hosted partition [with effectively nothing more than disk] could serve both to test the upgrade of that product and validation that the product functions as expected after the upgrade complete; functions both standalone and interacting with the OS and other applications, as verified in that hosted partition. If the upgrade fails or the function of the product is in error, especially if in some way impacts the data, then that hosted partition [with the failed install of the product] is just reset to its pre-upgraded state. Then fixes and/or workarounds can be put in place on the next attempt to test if the upgrade of that product is going to be functional. That would be repeated until all of the procedures for effecting a functional installation were documented, from which it is then inferred that repeating those documented steps on the production [hosting] partition will give the same positive result.

Regards, Chuck