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| When to use WPARs | ||
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Use WPARs when you need an isolated environment and you do not want to create new LPARs because of the limitation of the available resources. Here are the few scenarios:
WPARs share the global resources with other WPARs in the same LPAR, which limits the usefulness of WPARs in some situations.
We recommend not using WPARs in the following situations:
Security: WPAR processes can be seen by the global environment from the central LPAR. If you are running a highly secure type of system, this may be a problem for you from a security standpoint. Further, the root administrator of your LPAR will now have access to your workload partition, possibly compromising the security that the application may require.
Performance: Each WPAR within the LPAR uses the same system resources of the LPAR. You need to be more careful when architecting your system and also when stress testing the system.
Availability: If you are in an environment where it is very difficult to bring a system down, it's important to note that when performing maintenance on an LPAR that every WPAR defined will be affected. At the same time, if there is a system panic and AIX crashes, every WPAR has now been brought down.
Production: Avoid using WPARs in the production environment. LPARs provide more granularity and complete OS isolation.
Physical devices: Physical devices are not supported within a WPAR. More details on WPAR administration can be found in the IBM red book on WPARs at