Patent ID: 7076570

Claim:
A method for managing hardware indicator lights in a computer system, comprising: defining a plurality of logical partitions of said computer system and resources allocated to each respective partition; establishing a respective set of multiple virtual indicator lights for each of one or more hardware indicator lights, each virtual indicator light in a set of multiple virtual indicator lights corresponding to a respective logical partition, each virtual indicator light having a state; setting the state of each respective virtual indicator light responsive to a corresponding request from a process executing within the logical partition to which the respective virtual indicator light corresponds; and determining the state of each hardware indicator light as a function of the states of the virtual indicator lights of the respective set of virtual indicator lights for the hardware indicator light; wherein said step of determining the state of each hardware indicator light as a function of the states of the virtual indicator lights comprises generating a logical OR function of the states of the virtual indicator lights of the respective set of virtual indicator lights for the hardware indicator light.