Partition planning

Learn more about planning your logical partition configuration.

Creating logical partitions on your system can ease management of your system and help enable your system to use its resources more effectively and efficiently. Using logical partitions, you can consolidate the workloads of multiple servers onto a single server. To effectively use logical partitions, you must plan your logical partition environment, such as how many partitions you need and what types of work those partitions will be performing.

The System Planning Tool (SPT) is available to assist you in planning for logical partitions. The SPT can help you plan the number of virtual resources to assign each logical partition and can help you determine where to place hardware within the server to support your logical partition needs. SPT also incorporates the IBM® Systems Workload Estimator (WLE), and IBM Performance Management for eServer™ System i® to help you plan for workloads and performance.

After you are satisfied with your system plan, you can save the configuration data to a system-plan file. The system-plan file reflects your system requirements, while not exceeding resource recommendations. You can then import the system-plan file into the marketing configurator (eConfig) for ordering, and the Hardware Management Console (HMC) or Integrated Virtualization Manager for automated validation and deployment. The Virtual Partition Manager does not support automated system plan deployment.