Planning Volume 2, Control Workstation and Software Environment

Part 3. Appendixes

Appendix A. The System Partitioning Aid - A brief tutorial

PSSP includes a tool to facilitate system partitioning activity. You can partition any SP system that does not use the SP Switch2 and that is not a system of clustered enterprise servers. The objectives of this application are to enhance understanding of system partitioning, and to allow you to create system partitioning configurations beyond those provided with PSSP. This application, called the System Partitioning Aid, is provided in two forms:

sysparaid

a command line interface (CLI) which is text-file based;

spsyspar

a graphical user interface (GUI) which provides capability to view graphical representations of system partitioning layout alternatives, and to dynamically create new alternatives.

The GUI makes use of the command line interface, and uses the SP Perspectives code for graphics support. Both interfaces allow you to verify candidate layouts, and allow you to save a new, valid layout to disk. The new layout is then available to be made the active configuration at a later date. This allows you to plan ahead for configuration changes.

This appendix describes the GUI, then the CLI version of this application. The GUI is the interface suggested for a person not experienced with partitioning. In addition, this appendix presents a partitioning exercise which addresses the example in Chapter 5 of this document.