Global Environment in an LPAR

As mentioned earlier, workload partitions are created within standard AIX 6
instances, and the global environment is the part of an AIX 6 instance which
does not belong to any workload partition. The global environment is therefore
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10 Workload Partitions in IBM AIX Version 6.1
similar to the operating system environment of earlier versions of AIX. This global
environment can be hosted within a dedicated LPAR or a micropartition.
A system administrator must be logged into the global environment to create,
activate, and manage workload partitions. Workload partitions cannot be created
within other workload partitions.
The global environment owns all physical resources of the LPAR: network
adapters, disks adapters, disks, processors, memory. It allocates CPU and
memory resources to the workload partitions. It provides them access to the
network and storage devices.
The global environment has visibility into the workload partitions. It is possible
from the global environment to see (and control) the processes executing within
the WPARs, and to see the filesystems used by the WPARs.
Most performance monitoring and tuning activities are performed from the global
environment.