Edit: This is still a valuable tidbit.
Originally posted February 23, 2016 on AIXchange
A while back a customer got word from Oracle that they would be charged for every core on a system that could be used for Live Partition Mobility, even cores that weren’t used by their Oracle database.
“IBM Power VM Live Partition Mobility is not an approved hard partitioning technology. All cores on both the source and destination servers in an environment using IBM Power VM Live Partition Mobility must be licensed.”
The customer found LPM very useful for performing maintenance on their hardware and rebalancing their workloads. They didn’t want to give it up, but naturally, they didn’t want to have to license every core on their machines, either.
To address this problem, they were looking for a way to disable LPM on their Oracle LPARs while still allowing their other LPARs to use LPM. Since LPM is enabled at the frame level with PowerVM Enterprise Edition, they were unsure how this could be done. Could they change the SAN zoning for these LPARs so they would be unable to run LPM? Or should they just bite the bullet and buy some smaller servers and completely segregate their Oracle workload onto frames with no LPM available? (They’re also considering migrating off of Oracle altogether.)
This post caught their eye. It describes how LPM can now be disabled on a per partition basis:
“HMC V8R8.4.0 introduces a new partition-level attribute to disable Live Partition Migration (LPM) for that partition. The HMC will block LPM for that partition as long as this attribute is enabled. This feature can be used by ISVs to deal with application licensing issues.
Some applications require the user to purchase a license for all systems that could theoretically host the running LPAR. That is, if an LPAR can theoretically be migrated (whether you do so or not) to a total of 4 managed systems, you may be required to purchase a software license for all 4 systems. If you don’t plan on ever migrating the LPAR hosting the application, then this attribute provides an audit-able mechanism to prevent the LPAR from ever being migrated. It should be noted that no IBM software has such licensing requirements.
One benefit of this attribute implementation is it is not dependent on the managed server firmware version so you can use this feature from the HMC enhanced+ GUI, REST API, or CLI on any system the HMC is managing.
One thing to note is that while NovaLink will honor this attribute in a co-managed environment, it does not provide anyway to alter the value.
Any change to this attribute is logged as a system event, and can be checked for auditing purposes. A system event will also be logged when the Remote Restart or Simplified Remote Restart capability is set. More specifically, a system event is logged when:
* any of these three attributes are set during the partition creation
* any of these three attributes are modified
* restoring profile data
Users can check system events using the lssvcevents CLI and/or the “View Management Console Events” GUI. Using HMC’s rsyslog support, these system events can also be sent to a remote server on the same network as the HMC.
1) Command to check which partitions managed by this HMC have LPM disabled or enabled
lssvcevents -t console | grep vclient
time=10/30/2015 10:11:32,text=HSCE2521 UserName hscroot: Enabled partition migration for partition vclient10 with Id 10 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567.
time=10/30/2015 10:01:35,text=HSCE2520 UserName hscroot: Disabled partition migration for partition vclient9 with Id 9 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567.
2) Command to check which partitions managed by this HMC have LPM disabled
lssvcevents -t console | grep HSCE2520
time=10/30/2015 10:01:35,text=HSCE2520 UserName hscroot: Disabled partition migration for partition vclient9 with Id 9 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567.
3) Command to check which partitions managed by this HMC have LPM disabled or enabled for a particular managed server (1234567)
lssvcevents -t console | grep “partition migration for partition” | grep 1234567
time=10/30/2015 10:11:32,text=HSCE2521 UserName hscroot: Enabled partition migration for partition vclient10 with Id 10 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567.
time=10/30/2015 10:01:35,text=HSCE2520 UserName hscroot: Disabled partition migration for partition vclient9 with Id 9 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567.
4) Command to check if a specific partition (vclient9) in a specific managed server (1234567) managed by this HMC has LPM disabled or enabled
lssvcevents -t console | grep “partition migration for partition vclient9” | grep 1234567
time=10/30/2015 10:01:35,text=HSCE2520 UserName hscroot: Disabled partition migration for partition vclient9 with Id 9 on Managed system ct05 with MTMS 8205-E6D*1234567″
Have you ever wanted or needed to disable LPM for specific LPARs, either due to an Oracle mandate or some other reason? Let me know in the comments.