In Advanced Technology Support (ATS), we like to think we know what we are doing. Then something catches us out and we think that we had better let every other Power Systems administrators know about this or there are going to be many horrified users out there and many complaints.   Note this problem hit our combination of HMC, VIOS and machines - you might get lucky but don't risk it!

Gareth Coates (my ATS partner) volunteered to perform the regular 6 month update of our systems but hit a BIG problem.  He writes:

This caught me (Gareth) out and could easily upset a lot of users:

• Imagine that you have a production server managed by redundant HMCs
• It has dual and redundant VIOS partitions
• You do a non-disruptive System Firmware upgrade followed by a non-disruptive (to the server) HMC V7R770 upgrade
• Then you shutdown one of the VIOS partitions - perhaps as part of a "rolling upgrade"
• But the VIOS LPAR fails to restart giving error messages HSCL058A and HSCL05E9
• So you then only have one, non-redundant VIOS and no clues on what went wrong or what to do next!

The answer is PTF MH01354 HMC V7 R7.7.0 Service Pack 2
It fixes the issue where activating a VIOS partition with partition id greater than 1 may fail with HSCL058A and HSCL05E9.
This image can be installed on top of:

• HMC Version 7 Release 7.7.0 Recovery installation (MH01343)  - - or - -
• HMC V7 Release 7.7.0 Service Pack 1 (MH01346) with or without additional PTFs installed.

The HMC Service Pack is downloadable from the IBM Supports website FixCentral

Thanks Gareth for the "heads up" - hopefully we can save some others from this "bear trap".