Replicating Changes Across Multiple HMCs

Edit: Have you set this up?

Originally posted January 15, 2019 on AIXchange

For any environment with multiple HMCs, data replication generally makes sense. IBM’s Customizable Data Replication service can help you accomplish this, no matter how your HMCs are set up:

The Customizable Data Replication service provides the ability to configure a set of Hardware Management Consoles (HMCs) to automatically replicate any changes to certain types of data so that the configured set of HMCs automatically keep this data synchronized without manual intervention.

The following types of data can be configured:

Customer information data

  • Administrator information (customer name, address, telephone number, and so on.)
  • System information (administrator name, address, telephone of your system)
  • Account information (customer number, enterprise number, sales branch office, and so on.)

Group data

  • All user-defined group definitions

Modem configuration data

  • Configure modem for remote support

Outbound connectivity data

  • Configure local modem to RSF
  • Enable an internet connection
  • Configure to an external time source

The Customizable Data Replication service can be enabled for the following types of operations:

Peer-to-peer
Provides automatic replication of the selected customized data types between peer HMCs. Changes made on any of these consoles are replicated to the other consoles.

Master-to-slave
Provides automatic replication of the selected customized data types from one or more designated master HMCs to one or more designated slave HMCs. Changes made on a master console are automatically replicated to the slave console.
This document includes links that go into detail on setting up peer-to-peer and master-to-slave replication. This companion doc tells you how to force replication:

As data is replicated from one HMC to another, an internal level indicator for the data being replicated is recorded each time the data is altered on the data source. Learn about how to force the replication of data from one or more data sources.

Each HMC keeps track of the level indicator for each type of data and will not accept data from a data source when the level indicator is not greater than that on the receiving HMC.Keep reading that doc to learn how to force the replication of data from one or more data sources when the level indicator on the receiving HMC is greater than that of the data sources.

If you’ve ever had to manage an environment with multiple HMCs and multiple HMC users, the benefits of the Customizable Data Replication service should be apparent. Changing a single HMC is far easier than attempting to propagate changes across a group of them.