System profile

A system profile is an ordered list of partition profiles that is used by the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to start the logical partitions on a managed system in a specific configuration.

When you activate the system profile, the managed system attempts to activate each partition profile in the system profile in the order specified. A system profile helps you to activate or change the managed system from one complete set of logical partition configurations to another.

You can create a system profile and specify more resources to partition profiles than the resources that are available on the managed system. You can use the HMC to validate the system profile against the currently available system resources and against the total system resources. Validating your system profile ensures that your I/O devices and processing resources are not over committed, and it increases the likelihood that the system profile can be activated. The validation process estimates the amount of memory that is needed to activate all of the partition profiles in the system profile. A system profile can pass validation but might not have enough memory to be activated.

System profiles cannot include partition profiles that specify shared memory. In other words, logical partitions that use shared memory cannot be activated by using a system profile.