HP Instant Capacity User's Guide for versions 8.x > Chapter 7 Global Instant Capacity

Global Instant Capacity Overview

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Global Instant Capacity, or GiCAP, provides HP customers with the flexibility to move usage rights (RTUs) for Instant Capacity components within a group of servers, and it also provides “pooled” temporary capacity across the group. This provides more cost-effective high availability, more adaptable load balancing, and more efficient and easier use of temporary capacity. A GiCAP Group is managed using the icapmanage command.

GiCAP is not available with OpenVMS 8.3 at initial release.

GiCAP provides several benefits:

  • Cost-effective High Availability. In case of planned or unplanned downtime, you can transfer usage rights from a failed partition on one server to one or more other servers in the group that are providing backup availability. Without GiCAP, the only way to provide this failover scenario is to provision each server with an adequate amount of temporary capacity in case of potential failures.

  • Load Balancing. To provide adaptability and accommodation of changing demands, usage rights can be transferred between servers in a group. For example, a server with extra unused capacity can release usage rights to be used to activate additional components on an overloaded server that needs extra capacity.

  • Pooled Temporary Capacity. Temporary capacity usage rights can be shared across servers for better efficiency and ease of use. By pooling temporary capacity, there is no need to provision temporary capacity for each server.

Global Instant Capacity is part of Instant Capacity versions 8.x on HP-UX systems, and is enabled by purchasing a special GiCAP Sharing Rights codeword. After purchase, the codeword can be retrieved from the HP Utility Pricing Solutions web portal, located at: http://www.hp.com/go/icap/portal. When you retrieve the codeword, you will need to provide the sales order number for the codeword purchase, the serial number of the Group Manager system, as well as partition information for the Group Manager. Applying this codeword on an HP-UX system running Instant Capacity enables the creation of a GiCAP Group.

The following diagram illustrates the process of configuring and using Global Instant Capacity.

Figure 7-1 Using Global Instant Capacity

Using Global Instant Capacity


Chapter 7 Global Instant Capacity
  		 


Global Instant Capacity Requirements