Implementation of Micro-Partitioning
As with LPAR, you can define the partitions in Micro-Partitioning with the HMC.
The following table lists the different types of processors you
can use with Micro-Partitioning:
| Type of processor | Description |
|---|---|
| Physical processor | A physical processor is the actual hardware resource, which represents the number of unique processor cores, not the number of processor chips. Each chip contains two processor cores. The maximum number of physical processors is 64 on POWER5-based systems. |
| Logical processor | A logical processor is the operating system's view of a managed processor unit. The maximum number of logical processors is 128. |
| Virtual processor | A virtual processor is the unit that represents the percentage of the logical processor that is shared by the different partitions. The maximum number of virtual processors is 64. |
When you create a partition, you must choose whether you want to create a shared processor partition or a dedicated processor partition. It is not possible to have both shared and dedicated processors in one partition. To enable the sharing of processors, you must configure the following options:
- The processor sharing mode: Capped or Uncapped1
- The processing capacity: Weight2
- The number of virtual processors: Desired, Minimum, and Maximum
Note: Capped mode means that the processing capacity never exceeds
the assigned capacity and uncapped mode means that the processing
capacity can be exceeded when the shared processing pool has available
resources.
Note: The processing capacity is specified in terms of processing
units that are measured in fractions of 0.01 of a processor. So for
example, to assign a processing capacity for a half of a processor,
you must specify 0.50 processing units on the HMC.