Edit: VIOS 1.5! VIOS 2.1! POWER6 blade! Changed the old publib link for lpcfgop to a knowledgecenter link.
Originally posted April 7, 2009 on AIXchange
Recently I needed to replicate a customer environment. So I took my blade, which was successfully running VIOS version 2.1, and loaded VIOS 1.5 with the latest service pack. I assumed I could just reload it from NIM and overwrite my current VIOS installation, and everything would be fine. However, after the reload, when I edited the TCP/IP information and logged into the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM), I was surprised to find that all of my partition information was still there.
When I attempted to remove partitions, I received errors:
rmsyscfg -r lpar -n i5os
[VIOSE01050502-0145] The current virtual adapter configuration for the management partition is not compatible with the requested configuration. Depending upon where this product was acquired, contact service representative or the approved supplier.
According to lsmap, the disks were still mapped; I’d assumed that they would no longer be there after the reload:
lsmap -all
SVSA Physloc Client Partition ID
————— ——————————————– ——————
vhost0 U7998.61X.060F4CA-V1-C11 0x00000000
VTD NO VIRTUAL TARGET DEVICE FOUND
SVSA Physloc Client Partition ID
————— ——————————————– ——————
vhost1 U7998.61X.060F4CA-V1-C13 0x00000000
VTD NO VIRTUAL TARGET DEVICE FOUND
SVSA Physloc Client Partition ID
————— ——————————————– ——————
vhost2 U7998.61X.060F4CA-V1-C15 0x00000000
VTD NO VIRTUAL TARGET DEVICE FOUND
I could remove these vhosts by running this command:
rmvdev -vtd vhost0
That seemed to clean up the output when I ran lsmap. However, when I rebooted, the mapping information returned.
I called support, and was told that my LPAR information was stored in NVRAM, and VIO was just rereading and reloading this information.
Support had me run:
lpcfgop -o clear
[VIOSW01040F00-0055] You requested to clear all partition configuration data on the managed system and set the configuration back to its original state. Do you want to continue (0 = no, 1 = yes)?
Then I restarted the VIO server.
shutdown -restart
Shutting down the VIO Server could affect Client Partitions. Continue [y|n]?
y
The lpcfgop command can also be found here.
After running lpcfgop and rebooting, my VIOS was in a pristine state, running the older VIO version:
ioslevel
1.5.2.5-FP-11.1 SP-01
It isn’t everyday that administrators are faced with reverting to an older VIOS level (though if you ever have issues with a VIOS 2.x upgrade, you may need to go back). Just remember, should you ever need to do it, that you’ll first need to clear your partition configuration information.