Until recently, if you were configuring a new LPAR with virtual FC adapters you couldn’t force it to log into the SAN before an operating system (such as AIX) was installed. I’ve written about this before (see link below). I also offered a way to work around this issue.   https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/cgaix/entry/new_hmc_commands_chnportlogin_and_lsnportlogin_login_in_virtual_fibre_channel_adapters_for_npiv_client_lpars1?lang=en   As mentioned in my post, there are new HMC commands to force a new LPAR to connect... [More]

Tags:  npiv virtual_fibre_channel powervm chris_gibson power_systems aix vios vfc

My team and I have recently been trying to stream line our AIX disaster recovery process. We’ve been looking for ways to reduce our overall recovery time. Several ideas were tossed around such as a) using a standby DR LPAR with AIX already installed and using rsync/scp to keep the Prod & DR LPARs in sync and b) using alt_disk_copy (with the –O flag for a device reset) to clone rootvg to an alternate disk which is then replicated to DR. These methods may work but are cumbersome to administer and (in the case of alt_disk_copy) require... [More]

Tags:  chris hds recovery led rootvg fc support ghostdev replication lpar hung gibson 554 boot replicated chris_gibson vfc vsp aix san channel virtual fibre dr disaster npiv hang

The first time I ran the ’ viostat   –adapter’ command I expected to find non-zero values for kbps , tps , etc, for each vfchost adapter. However, the values were always zero, no matter how much traffic traversed the adapters.                                                                                                           $ viostat -adapter 1 10                                                   ...                                                                       vadapter:                   Kbps       tps      bkread    ... [More]

Tags:  virtual vios powervm channel vfchost aix fibre viostat vfc -adapter npiv