First stumbling block, sure to be lots more…

We have come to a grinding halt in our plans to migrate the power7 system to VIOS based partitions. Looks like when the system was ordered our sales rep decided to get IBM to de-configure 2 of the processors! Now we have IBM looking at what it will take to first enable the cores and then get the correct licensing in place for PowerVM to allow us to configure them correctly!

We have been told by the “new” sales rep that normally IBM ships a system with all cores configurable so why the “original” sales rep took it upon herself to disable 2 of them is a puzzle but not a surprise. The systems saves all went well with no problems, but when we try to save the system plan (just in case we want to resurrect the old IBM i hosting IBM i config we should be able to do it fairly easily) the HMC is complaining about empty slots in the partition configurations. A call with IBM turns out that our “original” sales rep (there a theme going here :-)) did not migrate the HMC to be under our hardware configs as we had asked, so now we are trying to determine how to resolve that before we get IBM to work on why the system plan cannot be configured. In the meantime I decided to download and update the HMC to see if that fixes the problem, seems the HMC does not support UDF based file systems (IBM uses this all the time on Power so its a bit of a hole) while our Windows 8 system had no issue. Had to format the USB stick to FAT32 and copy the updates across again. Now it works and the service pack applied OK, just need to add a few PTF’s before we try to update the system plans again.

I hope things get a little easier (but I doubt it) as we migrate to the VIOS based partitioning, this has been quite a handful so far..

Chris…