How to work with IBM IVM ?

Fortunately enough i got a recent opportunity to work with IBM IVM, but offcourse in a very difficult customer situation.

And when on a very short notice , i had to Logically partition a Pseries P550 server into two AIX and Linux partition , initially i thought it would infact going to be a very difficult task as customer have no HMC at all and IVM documentation are very small in number and not clear though.

So here are basic steps to implement IVM on IBM Pseries server and partition it with the help of IVM.

1. First make sure that your Pseries server have standard virtualization license with it. If yes , there is possibility that it is not enabled. Here comes the concept of ASMI.

2. ASMI is web based tool which comes by default with IBM Power systems. Intel guys can comapre it with HP LILO function as you can do a large number of tasks on hardware level ( or Firmware level). You can even restart pseries server or configure speed of serial ports through ASMI.

If you want to make sure about virtualization capabilities of your pSeries server , access it with ASMI . There are two HMC related ports ( HMC1 and HMC2) which have default IP addresses ( 169.254.2.147 and 169.254.3.147) , so you have to just IP addresses of same subnet on your laptop and use a straight ethernet cable to connect to HMC1 or HMC2. You have to use admin user and admin password to login into ASMI for first time. Please note that until you change default password of admin user, ASMI will not allow you to do any other task.

To access ASMI, use your PC browser ( netscape, IE or Mozilla) to point to https://169.254.2.147

3. Once you login to ASMI, check about virtualization license on IBM pseries. It would be a great idea, if you shutdown the server and reset it to factory default setting.

4. Now you have to boot the server into SMS mode and put the VIO Server CD and start installation of VIO. It should be noted down that IVM is nothing , but VIO server itself. I used one of the internal disk to install VIO server.

5. Once installation is done , you have to accept the license on VIO , set the date on VIO and if required , configure virtual Ethernet as well.Finally give the IP address to VIO server using mktcpip command.

6. Now you can access IVM through browser , by using http://.

7. Using IVM web based interface, you can create new Lpars with different settings of processing units and memory. You can assign HEA ports to these Lpars for tcpip access. If present , you can assign dedicated FC and Ethernet adapters to these Lpars as well.

8. Finally , if you have SEA adapters on VIO server , you can enable virtual Ethernet bridging and use these virtual Ethernet adapters on client Lpars.

9. For disks , IVM allows you to create storage pools as well. Once IVM is installed , default rootvg pool is created on one of the internal disk. It would be a nice idea if you have another internal disk and you can mirror the VIO OS disk.

10. Now for client Lpars , you can use either internal disks or SAN disks. If going for SAN disks through dedicated adapters, there is no need to create virtual disks on VIO level. On the other hand , if you want to use internal disks ( as in my case) you have to create another disk pool on one of the internal disk and then create virtual disks on that disk pool and assign them to client lpars. These client lpars will access these virtual disks through virtual scsi adapters.

11. You can finally assign CD to client lpars and boot them into SMS mode , one by one and install OS of your choice on these Lpars.

My own observations about IVM that there are many limitations as compared to HMC, however it is still not a bad tool. As based on Websphere and Java , performance is slightly slow. Sometimes, it is time out and sometime it crashes. Another thing is that an experienced HMC user still have to adjust his HMC knowledge according to IVM functionalities and interface . This generally require some time , so dont panic at all when you see IVM interface for the first time. Be patient and spend some time using IVM and soon you will be able to handle it , even with more comfort as you handle HMC.