Originally posted by: manu12

Hi,

I am having very basis query.

What is soft partiton and Hard Partiton?

if Lpar is soft Partition and then what is hard partition? what are benifit of each of them?

Please suggest.
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Originally posted by: dukessd

No idea what you are asking.

Try google, then come back and ask again with MUCH more detail in your question and we "might" be able to help you in some way.

HTH.
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Originally posted by: unixgrl

Those aren't terms you'd hear in an IBM presentation.

At my company, a "hard" partition is one that has dedicated I/O adapters and is not
a VIO client.

A "soft" partition is a VIO client.

I suspect these terms are being used in some way wherever you work and you'll need to ask someone
there to find out exactly what they mean.
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Originally posted by: jklotz

Several years ago, hard partitionning referred to having a server running partitions which had dedicated hardware block, not only I/O, but dedicated memory and processors block too (thus adding processor or memory requires to add actually a physical block). To be honest, the only example I still have in mind is HP Superdome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_nPar_%28Hard_Partitioning%29 ).

In another area, Oracle has its own definition of "hard partitionning"
( http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf ), whose definition is slightly different.
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Originally posted by: manu12

Thanks Unixgrl.

wheather it means VIO Client and LPAR are same????
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Originally posted by: unixgrl

I was just giving an example of how we use the terms "hard" or "soft". You need to find out what meaning it has in your situation. Your CEO might mean something completely different than the System Admin.
We use "hard LPAR" to mean either a VIO client that has some dedicated adapters or a LPAR that is not a VIO client - depends on who is talking.
"soft" would be a VIO client that is fully virtualized.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

I suspect that you may have been getting the terms indirectly from someone talking about Oracle database licenses.

Oracle considers "hard partitioning" to be a virtualization technology that has a hard enforcement of processor capacity. Examples of virtualization technologies that Oracle considers "hard" for licensing purposes includes Power Systems PowerVM LPARs, Oracle Dynamic System Domains, capped Oracle Solaris Zones, and HP vPar and HP nPar.

Virtualization that Oracle considers "soft" (not enforcing hard limits on processor capacity) include things like AIX Workload Manager (WLM), HP Process Manager, Solaris 9 Resource Containers. The relevant Oracle licensing document can be found at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf

Jay
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