Workload Partitions are a form of compacting down your environment into something more manageable and faster/easier to deploy or destroy. The idea of a WPAR is that you can run the work of multiple LPARs within a single LPAR. By creating an LPAR with WPAR capabilities, you can fill it with images running multiple instances of AIX workloads.
By consolidating your LPAR environment, you can create more easily manageable servers for environments with multiple development, sandbox and testing deployments. Often times with the increase in virtualization, we treat LPARs as though they are disposable machines (which technically they are). By creating a WPAR, you increase the ease of set up, tie up less physical resources, and keep your environment breadth steady. You will also only need to use one OS image, rather than maintaining and purchasing multiple AIX licences.
The downside to WPARs is the single point of failure. Performing general maintenance on an LPAR which results in an outage will create outages for all running WPARs on the LPAR. This means that upgrades etc. on an LPAR become the equivalent of those on a frame. If it goes down, you might be bringing down several LPARs at a time.
Two types of LPARs exist: System and Application. System WPARs are the most similar to a fully functioning LPAR. It has inetd and cron daemons and consists of file systems etc. Application WPARs are WPARs created solely for a single application. Once the application completes and closes, the WPAR disappears. Application WPARs don’t run daemons and do not contain file systems.
Some commands you might want to familiarize yourself with are:
mkwpar -n wpar_name -> create a new WPAR with the specified name
lswpar -> list existing WPARs and distinguish those that are active from those that are not
startwpar wpar_name -> start the specified WPAR
clogin wpar_name -> login to the WPAR (will login to an AIX environment)
savewpar -> create backup of WPAR
restwpar -> restore the WPAR
** Creating File Systems -> You will have to create file systems from the global environment under the /wpar file system and then mount the file system in the WPAR
**Creating Users -> Users can be managed within the WPAR and those created in the WPAR will be restricted to the WPAR (will not affect the global environment)
I hope this explanation of WPARs and their place in your environment has helped, and that the included commands will help get you started.
