A system profile is an ordered list of partition profiles that is used by the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to start the logical partitions on a managed system in a specific configuration. This topic includes a flash demo that shows an example scenario of creating system profiles on server hardware.
When you activate the system profile, the managed system attempts to activate each partition profile in the system profile in the order specified. A system profile helps you activate or change the managed system from one complete set of logical partition configurations to another.
It is possible for you to create a system profile that has a partition profile that has overcommitted resources. You can use the HMC to validate the system profile against the currently available system resources and against the total system resources. Validating your system profile ensures that your I/O devices and processing resources are not overcommitted, and it increases the likelihood that the system profile can be activated. The validation process estimates the amount of memory needed to activate all of the partition profiles in the system profile. It is possible that a system profile can pass validation and yet not have enough memory to be activated.
The following Flash demo explains how
system profiles are used. The following Flash demo requires the Flash plug-in. 
Alternatively, you can use the HTML version of this demo.