Edit: I cannot imagine anyone needs to do this now, but you never know what is still running out there all these years later.
Originally posted September 8, 2009 on AIXchange
Over lunch recently, a customer told me about the frustrations he incurred while trying to migrate his server from the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) environment to the Hardware Management Console (HMC) environment.
From the IBM Repaper, “Integrated Virtualization Manager on IBM System p5“:
Section 5.2.4: “There is no officially announced procedure to migrate from an IVM environment to the HMC. If an HMC is connected to the system, the IVM interface will be disabled immediately, effectively making it just a Virtual I/O Server partition. The managed system goes into recovery mode. After recovery completes, the HMC shows all of the LPARs without a profile. You have to create one profile for each LPAR.”
So it can be done, as I figured it could be. In an effort to find specifics, I e-mailed a few people I thought might know how to do this. IBMer Janel Barfield, who has worked with and given training on POWER virtualization technology, sent me the reply that follows. I’ve not had time to test this, so while I expect it would work, I don’t know for sure that it will. Perhaps a reader might be willing to try it out and report back. If not, I’ll fire up a test box and give it a try.
Before connecting your HMC to your server, log into the IVM, and back-up your profile data. Start at the Service Management menu. Select Backup/Restore and then, when the Backup/Restore page is displayed, select Generate Backup. Alternatively, you can do this from the Virtual I/O Server by entering this command:
bkprofdata -o backup -f /home/padmin/profile.bak
Source: IBM PowerVM Virtualization Managing and Monitoring Redbooks publication, section 5.2.3.
You may have to store the profile backup file on a CD to be able to restore it on the HMC.
From the HMC, restore the profile data from an ssh session. Load the diskette or CD containing your configuration data into your HMC drive. Then enter this command:
migrcfg -t 1 -m [system-name] -f [filename]
Source: Appendix C in the Hardware Management Console V7 Handbook.
Why might this procedure be useful? If you wish to try out Power servers but don’t know if you’ll need an HMC, you can just use the IVM on a standalone machine. However, once your environment grows and you add more Power servers, then having an HMC manage them all might make more sense. So in the event you eventually decide to migrate from the IVM to the HMC, backup files save you the hassle of having to manually recreate them from the GUI.
In the same vein, hopefully you saw the IBM Systems Magazine case study on a customer that used scripting in the creation of LPARs.
From the article:
“Now, thanks to VIO and some crafty coding, the company can re-create all of its LPARs at the same time.
“It’s Fortman’s scripts that do much of the heavy lifting, especially when it comes to automatically building the VIO client LPARs on the HMC. For example, in TTI’s production environment, the scripts query and extract all VIO client LPAR information. They then transform that information so each LPAR can then be rebuilt from the command line of the HMC.” You can see an example of Fortman’s scripting.
“Fortman adds: ‘We basically extract all of the information about our environment on a daily basis and turn that into executable commands that we send off-site with all of our other DR information. Then, at the DR site, we pull out these scripts and use them to auto-build our entire VIO client LPAR infrastructure.’
“This is in contrast to using the HMC Web interface, which requires users to manually navigate through this process. In the case of TTI, someone can remotely run the scripts in the HMC and have all of the
LPARs automatically populated based on the information included in the scripts.”
In each case, the goal is to try to avoid having to use the GUI to recreate the profile information. And, in both cases, it appears we can do just that.