When we ordered the new Power 720 we had always planned to partition it up and have multiple IBMi partitions running, we chose to go the IBMi hosting IBMi route as it was the simpler of the options we had available. Now with the new Power8 systems IBM is recommending that we brush up on our AIX skills (YUK!) and look at using VIOS as the hosting partition as this will be the way of the world… So we are going to bite the bullet and remove the existing IBMi partitions and replace with a brand new configuration using VIOS.
As part of this change we are also going to install AIX and Linux partitions, these are mainly going to be for testing but as we use Linux a lot for our web development it will allow us to move our production Linux servers to the Power7 system. The IBM i partitions will be running under VIOS as well which will remove the minor headache we had of having to end the hosted partitions while we did maintenance on the main hosting partition, this is our main development partition so it was the one where most of our daily activities occurred and is kept up to the latest PTF levels often.
We have downloaded a couple of red books and red papers as part of our planning which we will use as a guide to setting up the system, having looked at the content we will certainly get a refresher in AIX command line processing as we move forward. We have also contacted IBM about our processor activations as it looks like it was screwed up when we purchased the system and subsequently added an additional IBMi activation. Eventually we should have 2 IBM i cores and 1 AIX core activated (not sure about the Linux activation but it should run as a micro partition using the AIX activation?) so we will micro partition the 2 IBM i cores across 4 IBM i partitions and have either AIX and Linux or just Linux running on the additional core.
The first thing we are doing is doing a system save of all of the partitions, the save of the hosting partition will actually save the hosted partitions but for installing under VIOS we will need the saves of the individual instances. When we restore the main partition we will need to somehow remove the hosted partitions (not sure how we restore the system without the NWSD objects and configurations but I am sure IBM will have some answers).
Once we have saved everything we are going to need to delete the existing set up and create a new drive configuration (currently raid 6 protection set on all drives) because VIOS needs to be installed on a separate drive and we want to set the drive protection at the VIOS level for the remaining drives (at least that’s my initial thoughts).
As we progress through I will be posting updates about what we have achieved and some of the problems we encounter.
Chris…