The HMC has been enhanced to simplify management of PowerVM VIOS virtual storage and virtual network resources. Management of these virtual resources can now be done through graphical Web interfaces instead of the VIOS command line commands.
The new Web interfaces into VIOS simplify:
- Storage device management with views for Physical Volumes, Logical Volumes, File backed storage, disk backed storage pools, and NPIV Fibre Channel
- Management of physical optical devices and virtual optical media libraries
- Network management, including configuration of fail-over for Shared Ethernet devices
For storage management, the HMC provides the ability to create storage pools, create virtual disks and assign those disks to client partitions, assign physical block storage to client partitions, create virtual media libraries from which images can be added for client partition usage, assign physical optical devices to client partitions, and for NPIV-capable VIOS partitions, assign physical ports of an NPIV-capable adapter to client partitions.
From the network perspective, the HMC provides the ability to create shared Ethernet adapters on the VIOS partitions, including the capability to create a shared Ethernet failover between two VIOS partitions that are participating on the same set of VLANs. The HMC also provides the ability to create a Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) with a physical Ethernet adapter, Logical Host Ethernet Adapter (LHEA), or an Ethernet channel.
