I am looking into HP-UX 11.31 VMs and I had a few questions.
We own two systems with 11.31 installed on them:
HP 9000 rp3440 (RISC)
2gb memory
2 processors
HP Integrity rx2660 (Itanium)
8gb memory
4 processors
Looking at the memory requirements in the Integrity VM Admin Guide [here] it looks like 2gb memory isn't nearly enough to run VMs on, and I don't know if that hardware is even supported, so I'm guessing the hp9000 machine isn't going to cut it (?), but the rx2660 looks good to go. Also vPars don't seem to be supported on the rx2660 which is why I am going the HPVM route.
1) Do HPVMs have completely separate, dedicated resources? I need to set up VMs that do not share resources, such as kernel, CPU, etc.
1b) And if so, is it a 1-to-1 CPU mapping for VMs? (1 CPU for host, leaving me 3 to use for 3 HPVMs)
2) The admin guide and the release notes [here] say the host OS should not have applications running on it. Does this mean I will have to install a fresh copy of 11.31 on my rx2660? Or can I just install patches and update to the required patch version?
3) Speaking of patches, the release notes say I should be running September 2012 (AR1209) release. How do I obtain this patch? HP's software page for the rx2660 [here] does not seem to list any patches, and the 11.31 Installation guide (that I do not have a link to at the moment) says I can run "swa report" to possibly obtain patches (?) however when I run the command, I get the following error:
======= 12/24/12 18:45:54 PST BEGIN Report on Issues and New Software
(user=root) (jobid=hpitqa-04)
* Gathering Inventory
* Using existing inventory for host "hpitqa-04"
* Getting Catalog of Recommended Actions and Software
ERROR: Certificate issued to VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3 was not
signed by the same certificate as the certificate revocation list
(CRL) "http://crl.verisign.com/RSASecureServer.crl", specified by the
"crl_url" extended option. It may be necessary to disable the CRL
checking with the "crl_check" option.
======= 12/24/12 18:46:03 PST END Report on Issues and New Software failed
with 1 error. (user=root) (jobid=hpmachine)
NOTE: More information may be found in the Software Assistant logfile
"/var/opt/swa/swa.log".
Is there some other place I am supposed to download patches, and is there any specific method of installing them?
Yes, they have separate resources, you will make new HPUX installation on every new VM.
You can configure your CPU entitlement as you like with virtual CPU.
It is possible to go as low as 1% of one CPU for one VM.
I would recommend reinstalling the box, and making setup as per documentation.
Since you will be installing a lot, a good start would be to install ignite, make a install depot from DVD and boot clients (VM's) via BOOTP or DHCP (i would go bootp, long forgotten but very useful and easy )
Use your PA-RISC box for this, since you can have ignite on 11.11 or more, and boot / install any version of HPUX from it.
It's a bit work on start, but later on you will be able to get VM's up in short time, use ignite for backups on tape or disk etc.
As for patches, you will need to have some sort of HP support to download them.
Make a HP account, contact your representative for information about your contracts.
I believe SWA will want to connect to internet with that account to gather information about missing / rec. patches.
All my boxes are behind firewall without internet, i only gather reports from HPSIM with SWA installed.
Most of the time, after OS install, you will just need to apply the gold qpk patch bundle.
It's fairly simple with swinstall, one big depot.
Remember, you will need to patch VM's guests as well, since it's a separate HPUX install.
HP Integrity VM is Itanium-only software. It isn't available for PA-RISC.
CPU is shared via entitlement percentage, with minimum and maximum thresholds.
Memory is dedicated. For example, if you have a HP-VM host with 32 GB of RAM, and you left 8 GB for the Host, that leaves 24 GB free for creating VM's. You could make 3 VM's, each with 8 GB. (there is actually a tiny % overhead for each VM, so the numbers are exactly as clean as my example, but "close enough").
Disk can be shared in the sense that a VM can reside on a whole physical disk (what we're doing, with LVM mirroring) or on an LVM partition, or as a file on a filesystem.
Network can be either dedicated or shared, via virtual switches.
You are correct, 2 GB total is not enough to create any VM's.
Our production systems have been running since 2008 on rx6600's with 128 GB of RAM and 8 cores. We have four of these physical machines, running ~20 virtual machines. We've found it to be a robust and reliable platform. The OS licensing is also favorable - you can create as many virtual machines as you want - there is no per-VM OS licensing for virtual machines.
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