Edit: I have not thought about websm in quite a while. Another blast from the past. The links still work, which always surprises me after so many years.
Originally posted September 24, 2007 on AIXchange
After I attended Hardware Management Console (HMC) version 7 training recently, I was inspired to upgrade my HMCs to version 7. I was also inspired to share what I learned. The following are some of the highlights; you can get more details from the HMC Redbook.
This new release allows you to use a browser to connect to the HMC instead of using Web Based System Manager (websm). This means one less step is required when remotely accessing our HMC. Instead of going to hmc.ip.address/remote_client.html to download and install websm code, we can just go to hmc.ip.address with our browser and manage our machine that way without the need for additional software to be loaded on our laptops.
In days gone by, you had an HMC for POWER4 systems and a different HMC for POWER5 systems; you couldn’t mix and match them. With HMC version 7, you can manage POWER5 and POWER6 machines with the same HMC, you don’t necessarily have to get new hardware for your HMC to manage your new machines (assuming they are supported models).
How many times have you seen an error code on your system LED or in websm and wondered what it meant? To find out meant following this process: Writing the error code down, finding the documentation that told me what the code meant, or calling IBM Support to ask them what it meant. Now you can look up error codes with the built-in hyperlinked documentation. You can click on the code and have the meaning displayed. This should make finding out what’s wrong with your hardware a much simpler process.
Partition Availability Priority is a concept that’s similar to weighting partitions in that you give different weights to the different partitions. These weights aren’t used for the day-to-day operations of your partitions, you still set that up in the profile. The Partition Availability settings are used if you were to lose a processor and the system needed to decide which partition most needed to have cycles available to keep it running. It might be a good idea to be sure your production partitions had a higher priority than your test partitions in the event that a processor went away.
Another interesting topic that was covered was Utility Capacity On Demand (COD). I can remember situations where there would be heavy workloads and customers would use reserve COD and end up being charged a fee for using a processor for a full day, even though they only needed those CPUs for a few hours each night. With the new billing model, they’ll be charged on a minute-by-minute basis instead of a daily basis. This can be a huge advantage when you have peak workloads that require more computing resources than usual, but you don’t necessarily want to buy that large machine to sit around idle most of the time.
Check the IBM Systems Hardware Infocenter for information about upgrading from version 6 to version 7, and let me know if you find any other interesting features with this new release.