Select interactive performance

Every physical system is purchased with a specific quantity of interactive performance which is allocated to the partition as a percentage of the total system interactive performance.

Interactive performance enables you to run jobs that require user interaction in contrast to batch jobs which require no user interaction. Each partition has a unique requirement for the amount of interactive performance.

To move interactive performance, you have to establish a minimum and maximum range within which you can move the resource without needing to restart the logical partition. If you change either the minimum or maximum value you will have to restart the partition.

You can specify an interactive performance minimum value equal to the minimum amount of interactive performance needed to support the logical partition. The maximum value must be less than the amount of interactive performance available on the system. The maximum interactive performance is limited by the number of processors in a partition.

Relationship between 5250 interactive capacity, logical partitioning, and Capacity on Demand

You allocate 5250 interactive capacity across logical partitions by specifying a percentage of the overall available capacity. The method you use to allocate 5250 interactive capacity to a logical partition works the same on all iSeries™, models, whether the models have standby processors or not:

For servers with interactive features, you can allocate a percentage of the interactive feature capacity to be made available for 5250 interactive processing.
For Enterprise Edition servers, you can allocate a percentage of the active processor capacity to be made available for 5250 interactive processing .
For Standard Edition servers, there is no 5250 interactive processing capacity to allocate. However, up to 100% of the active processor capacity is available to any partition with a single job doing 5250 interactive processing.

The rules for assigning interactive capacity are as follows.

The server restricts you from assigning more 5250 interactive capacity to a partition than the assigned processor capacity in the same partition.

This restriction prevents you from wasting 5250 interactive capacity. For example, for a server with six installed and activated processors, each processor has approximately 16.7% of the total server capacity. For a single-processor partition on this server with an Enterprise Edition, the maximum 5250 interactive allocation can be 17% of the total 5250 interactive capacity, which allows you to allocate slightly more 5250 interactive capacity than the partition's processor capacity. However, you cannot allocate 17% on all of the six one-processor partitions because the total exceeds 100%.

The percentage of interactive capacity you assign is based on the total number of installed processors, whether they are activated or not.

However, you can only use the interactive capacity for activated processors. For example, for a server with six installed processors and three activated processors with three one-processor partition, you cannot allocate more than 50% of interactive capacity across all three processors. This is because you only have access to interactive capacity for the three activated processors. Therefore if you create three one-processor partitions, you can allocate 16.7% interactive capacity for each partition. But if you attempt to allocate 16.7% interactive capacity for two partitions and 30% interactive for the third partition, the third partition will fail.