Category: VIOS

SR-IOV technology on POWER – my few words

Finally the announcement day arrived. POWER8 and SR-IOV have been introduced to the world, and I can share my experience from my last residency.

Single Root I/O Virtualization are not new adapters, but this is a new technology, standard, specification. In fact, it uses adapters which are on the market for some time already. Specification allows to get a slice of a physical adapter and assign it an LPAR. This feature requires a proper hardware, firmware, and all elements around it.

Continue reading “SR-IOV technology on POWER – my few words” →

IBM i with VLAN tagged network

Have you ever think to run your IBM i machine with in IEEE 802.1Q standard, and use the capabilities which offers VLAN tagging? You might heard that your AIX, LINUX colleagues already use it for ages, but for IBM i, this technology is still not available. Well, it is possible!  You can trunk multiple VLANs to one physical port, if you configure the POWER Hypervisor to handle this traffic. Continue reading “IBM i with VLAN tagged network” →

viosvrcmd – the backdoor to the PHyp?

The title is provocative, but if we agree that Virtual I/O Server is part of the POWER Hypervisor it’s absolutely true. The command viosvrcmd is a HMC command which allows to perform any non-interactive VIO commands by a HMC user which has the taskrole authority – ‘VirtualIOServerCommand’ and visibility to a VIOS LPAR without be prompting for VIOS user and password.

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Live Partition Mobility on IBM i – step by step

It’s pretty new feature on IBM i, for AIX its availably since 2007. In VMware world its called VMotion. In my opinion it is still not very popular. Software vendors must still adopt their software for seamless migrations. But IBM gave us a technology which works very well.

Continue reading “Live Partition Mobility on IBM i – step by step” →

Managing the Virtual Media Repository

Virtual media repository is very useful PowerVM feature. Some older IBM i administrators probably remember similar function available in iSeries ages ago. In short way, it allows to share CD/DVD images on a frame/server layer.

I use it very often, because it allows load a SLIC without physical access to a server. Practically you can install an IBM i OS, on completely new POWER server, which doesn’t even have a physical CD/DVD drive.

In this post I’d like to show different methods how to manage the Virtual Media Repository. Continue reading “Managing the Virtual Media Repository” →

Changing WWPN of a virtual fiber adapter

You’ve probably noticed WWPNs are automatically generated by a HMC.  But you might get to the point when you need specific World Wide Port Name. Each HBA must have an unique number.  That’s why IBM didn’t give us a choice, and generates these strings automatically. First few characters (C050760….) define a virtual resource. The rest of the string is unique.  A serial number of a console is used to generate distinctive identifier. The problem is when you do some maintenance work, and you lost your ‘old’ WWPN, or you need to migrate to a different VIOS. In most situation you can reconfigure your SAN infrastructure. But if you need to keep a WWPN, you can explicitly set it from a HMC command line. Continue reading “Changing WWPN of a virtual fiber adapter” →