Poulson MIA?
Still no word on the new Integrity servers that will hopefully go along with this new version of HP-UX? Was it this quiet before the launch of Tukwila too?
Hewlett-Packard has just rolled up an update to its venerable Unix platform that gives more virtualization options to more customers and better control over virtualization hypervisors and guests running on its Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome iron. HP is on an odyssey – a a Project Odyssey in fact – to bring Xeon …
Yes, there will be... in fact there have been three of these "update releases" of 11iv3 since Oracle "dropped the bomb" on Itanium support (March 2011, September 2011, and March 2012). Oracle 10g/11g is supported on all 3. They certify Oracle against the major OS release plus minimum patch level - same as they do on AIX & Solaris.
"....Prior to this, only IBM's DB2 V9.X and Oracle's 10g and 11g databases were certified for use with Serviceguard clustering...." That statement is a bit misleading. All Serviceguard is under the wrapper is a set of scripts that handle the calling of application executables and associated resources (storage volumes, IP addresses, etc) to start and stop them in the order required on the node of choice. Whilst hp added some extra support and scripts around certified applications, for years users have been able to make their own scripts for just about any hp-ux application to run inside a Serviceguard cluster, inlcuding databases like PostgreSQL.
The situation with vPars is slightly different to the way that you describe.
vPars first became available for the i2 blade family late last year with vPars A.06.00, which only ran on these boxes. Since they don't have a huge number of IO slots, just plenty of bandwidth, they switched from using dedicate PCI slots for vPars to using shared IO model which externally looks like the one previously used n the VMs, but with the addition of NPIV support for virtual HBAs.
This new update, B.06.10 merges the vPar and HPVM products although doesn't yet allow mixing them. This release adds the SuperDome2 and rx2800i2 to this version of vPars. IO for storage is still shared, but some of the new LAN cards are supported in a dedicated modes of operation.
SuperDome2 customers now have a choice as to whether to run this version of vPars with shared IO, or whether they want to remain running a vPars environment of purely dedicated (no overhead) resources, and there is an update to this environment too.
Previous cell based systems continue to have their own vPars implementation with no size limits or virtualization overhead.
Sorry its all a bit confusing.
".....vPars first became available for the i2 blade family late last year with vPars A.06.00...." Yes and no. I'd say it's more accurate to say vPars became SUPPORTED by hp with the release mentioned. Prior to that, vPars was supported on the cell-based Integrity servers (rp/rx7xx0, rp/rx8xx0 ranges and Superdomes), even though the software could be run on top of any hp-ux 11i install. Years ago I had two-socket testing box with vPars on it, which was strictly speaking not supported by hp, but worked just fine. When I asked our hp rep why vPars support was restricted to the cell-based servers he told me it was due to hp wanting it to be used in mission critical solutions, and for them the that really meant the larger servers. I assume that now those larger servers are being replaced by the blades-based offerings I suppose hp just decided to widen the partitioning offering for them.