Suspend and Unsuspend communications for management domain

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The Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC) subsystem that runs on the Power® Hardware Management Console (HMC) and the logical partitions (LPAR) with the AIX® operating system, Linux® operating system, or Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) is responsible for establishing a management domain between the HMC and LPARs that use the HMC as its Management Control Point (MCP). This management domain formation is referred as the RMC connection.

Once the management domain is established, and RMC that is running on both the HMC and the LPAR is used to exchange responses and checks if communication is working by sending and receiving heartbeats periodically.

The RMC connection can be suspended and unsuspended to facilitate operations on LPAR. For example, Live Kernel Update operation on the AIX operating system.

To Support suspend and unsuspend communications between HMC and LPAR only for the for management domain, new resource actions for the IBM.MCP classes called SetSuspendState and GetNodeState are introduced. From an LPAR, you must use the SetSuspendState resource action for the IBM.MCP class to support suspended and unsuspended communication between HMC and LPAR for management domain only.

You must consider the following options when you are using the GetNodeState and the SetSuspendState resource actions to suspend and unsuspend communication:

If the communication between HMC and LPAR is suspended in the LPAR, the communication remains in a suspend state until an explicit unsuspend action is issued for the resource or RMC daemon is restarted.
If the communication between HMC and LPAR is suspended in the LPAR, HMC can not perform operations like DLPAR, LPM and so on.
If the communication between HMC and LPAR is suspended on the LPAR, refreshing the RMC daemon by using the refresh -s ctrmc command does not result in an unsuspend state for the resources for which the suspend action was issued.

You can run the runact -s <MCP resource Selection String> SetSuspendState State=1 command to suspend communications between HMC and LPAR.

To unsspend communications between HMC and LPAR, run the runact -s <MCP resource Selection String> SetSuspendState State=0 command.

To query current suspend and unsuspend communication, run the runact -s <MCP Details> GetNodeState command.

The output structured data contains the following elements:

Table 1. Elements of output structured data
Element Name	Description	Value
LocalStatus	A value for the `LocalStatus` field in response to the `GetNodeState` resource action that specifies the current connection status to the remote node that is being reported locally.	0 Indicates current communication state that is suspended from local node perspective. 1 Indicates that current communication is active from local node perspective. 2 Indicates that current request is pending with RMC.
RemoteStatus	A value for the `LocalStatus` field in response to the `GetNodeState` resource action that specifies the current connection status to the local node being reported on the remote node.	0 Indicates current communication state that is suspended from local node perspective. 1 Indicates that current communication is active from local node perspective. 2 Indicates that current request is pending with RMC.
LocalSuspendState	A value for the `LocalSus-pendState` field in response to the `GetNodeState` resource action that specifies whether local node has suspended communication or not.	0 Not suspended. A nonzero value specifies the local node suspended communication.