RE: Guest Partitions

Jerry,

There should be no additional cost for OS and LPP's. Some third party
products want to know lpar number though, so be aware of that.

I can't imagine running a single physical disk machine. I am not a disk
arm fanatic, and I've even experienced better performance by dropping down
to 1/7th of the previous number of disk arms. Just faster drives. But,
still, a single disk arm machine makes me shudder. Three with raid when
coming from a true dog of a system. But a 4 or more drive raid set fixes
an issue that is platform independent with 3 drive raid sets.

Here's one of my smallest machines. No compilers. Just enough OS to run
Domino. Minimal use. NO "traditional" applications.
% of Size in
Description Disk 1,000,000 bytes
User libraries 11.99 33518.60
User directories 8.15 22778.07
Folders and documents .00 .11
QSYS .81 2256.35
Other IBM libraries 2.58 7217.56
Licensed Internal Code 1.58 4411.39
Temporary space 6.44 18009.67
Unused space 68.27 190912.48
System internal objects .08 217.62
Objects not in a library .00 .00
TOTAL 99.90 279321.85

In theory, this would fit on a 140GB drive. It's using 280GB at only
30+%full of guested disk space.
Size %
Unit Type (M) Used
1 6B22 279622 32.3
But that "single" disk is one of 34 disks on the partition hosting it so
that data is spread across 34 arms.

The biggest expense to do multiple partitions will be the need for an HMC.
However, twinax is not an option for a power 7. That goofy brick option
is gone. So you're down to a Lan Console (single partion) or the HMC.
Others have shaved costs by using their own screens and keyboards for the
HMC - a KVM, if you have it, is nice.

That could be an expense for you. Got a lot of twinax left you don't want
to replace? You may have to stay with Power 6 and throw money at buying a
twinax controller. Or bite the bullet now.

Rob Berendt