Defining WPAR clients

Workload partitions are software-based partitions that provide separate regions of application space within a single instance of the operating system.

System WPARs are a unique instance of AIX® with associated file systems and security domains. The operations to manage the WPAR are performed by a managing system that shares its operating system kernel with the WPARs on that system. Application WPARs are isolated process environments that do not have separate operating system environments (file systems and security domains). Only system WPARs may be managed by NIM. For more information on workload partitions, see IBM® Workload Partitions for AIX.

Workload partitions (WPAR) are represented in NIM as the wpar machine class.A WPAR can either be managed or unmanaged. A managed WPAR is associated with the managing system that hosts the WPAR. The managing system can perform management tasks to create, start, stop, and remove the WPAR. A WPAR must have a sequenced mgmr_profile attribute. This attribute identifies the name of the NIM object for the managing system and the local WPAR name on the managing system. For example, if the goslin WPAR is created on the ranger system, the mgmt_profile1 attribute would be ranger goslin. Operations on the goslin WPAR (that must be run through the managing system) are executed on the ranger system.

A NIM administrator can use several NIM commands to perform WPAR-system-management tasks. For more information about managing WPAR clients, see Managing WPAR clients.