Recovering the PowerVM NovaLink partition

The PowerVM® NovaLink installer contains recovery tools that you can use to recover from a hardware failure. To access recovery tools, boot the PowerVM NovaLink installer.

Checking service status

The PowerVM NovaLink partition contains the following system services that must always be running: pvm-core and pvm-rest. If you are not able to complete tasks on the PowerVM NovaLink partition, verify whether these services are running. Use the systemctl command to view the status of these services and to stop, start, and restart these services.

To view the status of a service, enter the following command, where service_name is pvm-core or pvm-rest.
sudo systemctl status service_name
To start a service, enter the following command.
sudo systemctl start service_name
To restart a service, enter the following command.
sudo systemctl restart service_name
To stop a service, enter the following command.
sudo systemctl stop service_name

Rebuilding the PowerVM NovaLink RAID array

By default, the PowerVM NovaLink partition uses two 30 GB logical volumes, each of which is hosted by an instance of Virtual I/O Server. The logical volumes are mirrored by using RAID 1. Each time you reboot one of the instances of Virtual I/O Server, the RAID array puts one of the disks into failure mode. The RAID array is rebuilt automatically every 15 minutes. However, if you want to rebuild the RAID array immediately after a Virtual I/O Server reboot, enter the following command at the PowerVM NovaLink command line.
sudo /usr/sbin/pvm-rebuild-raid

Shutting down the PowerVM NovaLink partition

The PowerVM NovaLink partition always restarts itself if you use normal operating system commands to shut down. To shut down the PowerVM NovaLink partition, enter the following command, where novalink_id is the partition ID of the PowerVM NovaLink partition.
pvmctl lpar power-off -i id=novalink_id

Log file location

Log files for PowerVM NovaLink are located in the /var/log/pvm directory on the PowerVM NovaLink partition. Use the /usr/sbin/pedbg command on the PowerVM NovaLink partition to gather the log files for service and support.