Getting Started with SDMC

Edit: I do not know very many people that got started or kept going with the SDMC.

Originally posted December 6, 2011 on AIXchange

Ready or not, the SDMC is on its way. I thought I’d get my toes wet by trying to test an SDMC virtual machine before I used the SDMC appliance. I ordered the SDMC DVDs and received the VMware and KVM versions. Given the option, I chose a VMware farm for the installation.

The DVD had quite a few large files on it, and rather than going on-site to physically load them, I just copied the files to my destination machine. Here’s the list of files I copied from the two DVDs.

Once I copied the files from the CD to my virtual machine, I ran the CreateSDMCova.bat script to covert the files into a large .ova image file.

This is from the README.txt file:

How to build the SDMC .ova image
——————————–

1. Copy all files from this disk (DVD1) to your build directory.
2. Copy all files from the 2nd disk (DVD2) to the same build directory (from step #1).
3. From this build directory, run CreateSDMCova to build the .ova image which can be deployed using ovftool.

For Linux,
# ./CreateSDMCova.sh 

For Windows,
> CreateSDMCova.bat

I was on a Windows machine, so I ran the CreateSDMCova.bat command, generating this output:

Creating .ova image….
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.00
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.01
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.02
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.03
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.04
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.05
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.06
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.07
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.08
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.09
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.10
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.11
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.12
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.13
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.14
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.15
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.16
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.17
SDMC_1119B_730_0512.18
        1 file(s) copied.

Then when I ran the dir command in my DOS window, I saw a new .ova file had been created from all of my image files:

170 CreateSDMCova.bat
144 CreateSDMCova.sh
57 md5sum
415 README.txt
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.00
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.01
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.02
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.03
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.04
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.05
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.06
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.07
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.08
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.09
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.10
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.11
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.12
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.13
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.14
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.15
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.16
419,430,400 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.17
312,432,640 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.18
7,862,179,840 SDMC_1119B_730_0512.ova

I went into VMware’s vcenter and followed the wizard to deploy the ovf / ova file:

After it deployed, I powered on the SDMC and brought up the console window in VMware so I could watch it boot up. It was similar to booting an HMC for the first time.

Once it came up, I was prompted to select the locale:

After accepting the license agreement, I reached the main wizard and completed the new install.

I filled in my date, time, passwords, IP configuration information, etc. Once it configured itself, it rebooted and brought up a login web page.

Incidentally, the sysadmin ID is now used for login (rather than hscroot). Once I logged in I reached this page.

I’ll add some systems soon, and in future posts I’ll discuss any issues I encounter.

Who else is test driving a SDMC? Have you gone live? Let me know in the comments.