Edit: Sometimes I miss the old interface.
Originally posted August 11, 2015 on AIXchange
I was recently playing around with the enhanced HMC GUI, using the new interface to look at an old test machine.
The test box had crash and burn LPARs that had been created over time. In some cases, I’d spin up a test LPAR and select the VIO server option that allowed for any client partition to connect to the virtual adapter I’d created. This was to allow greater flexibility going forward — it wouldn’t be necessary to re-create the adapter; I’d just assign another client LPAR to the existing one. If I hadn’t yet built the client LPAR definitions, I’d set up a bunch of server adapters ahead of time for later use with the crash and burn client LPARs.
On the new HMC software version, when I selected the manage PowerVM option, some of the disks and adapters weren’t appearing in the PowerVM Virtual storage adapter view. Since I could see them using the classic HMC view, I figured it was a bug and opened a ticket with IBM Support.
After some back and forth, support sent me this interesting information:
Server Adapters in HMC can be created with the option of “Any” for the Client Adapter. Such adapters are not supported by REST or by the Enhanced+ GUI. This is by design. It is not possible to know to which client adapter it is connected to. The Server adapter mapping could possibly change during the reboot of the logical partition. The REST and Enhanced+ GUI do not provide the option of creating a Server adapter with the “Any” option. The usage of “Any” is not recommended when creating Server Adapters, though it’s possible in Classic GUI.
That’s right. Adapters set to “Any” won’t display in the enhanced GUI option.
This explanation made sense once I thought about it, but since it took me awhile to get this answer, hopefully I can save you some time and trouble by passing it along here. Then again, hopefully you aren’t creating server adapters without assigning them to clients in the first place, which would save you from ever having to deal with this issue at all. Going forward I know I’ll be more careful when assigning virtual adapters on my test machines.