Adding resources to PowerVC

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After you register your initial hosts, networks, and optionally, storage and fabrics, with PowerVC, you can add additional hosts, networks, fabrics, and storage. You can also add existing virtual machines or volumes to your environment so that you can use PowerVC to manage those virtual machines or volumes.

You can add additional hosts and networks at any time on the Home page or by clicking Add on the Hosts or Networks page.

Adding fabrics

To add additional fabrics, click Add Fabric on the Fabrics tab of the Storage page. You can add any combination of PowerVC-supported fabrics. However, you cannot add both pluggable fabrics and fabrics for which there is integrated support.

Adding storage

To use additional Storage area network (SAN) storage, add it as a storage provider on the Overview tab on the Home page. Shared storage pool providers are not added this way. They are registered with PowerVC automatically when you add a host that has one or more Virtual I/O Servers that are active members of a Virtual I/O Server cluster and the cluster has a backing shared storage pool.

Note: If Virtual I/O Servers have been removed from the cluster and each of those Virtual I/O Servers is in a healthy state, then PowerVC automatically removes the shared storage pool provider. However, if the Virtual I/O Servers have been removed from the cluster and one of those Virtual I/O Servers is shut down, then the shared storage pool provider is not automatically removed. This is because the cluster might become active again after the Virtual I/O Server partition or partitions are reactivated.

If a shared storage pool provider is removed, then the default storage connectivity group for the provider is also automatically removed.

When you register a new storage provider, a storage template and a storage connectivity group are automatically created for that provider. To add an additional SAN switch, use the Fabrics tab on the Storage page.

To create a volume, use the Storage volumes page.
Note: When creating a volume for pluggable storage, the volume type, storage pool, real size, real capacity, and projected usage will not be shown because PowerVC does not have access to that information. Because this information cannot be verified, it is possible that volume creation might fail.

Adding network nodes

Network nodes are systems (either virtual machines with direct attach I/O or physical hosts) where virtual routers run. They route traffic to and from the external network (WAN). In your PowerVC software-defined networking (SDN) solution, network nodes route traffic on your overlay networks by using Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) networks. A network node takes on the role of a router and a virtual switch. The PowerVC management server manages the traffic rules on the network node. Each network node can have several virtual routers and can manage multiple networks. However, it is good practice to set up multiple network nodes. Follow these steps to add a network node:
  1. Ensure that your environment meets all requirements by reviewing this topic: SDN Requirements.
  2. From the PowerVC user interface, open the Networks page, then select Add Network Node.
    Note: When adding a network node that is already managed by a PowerVC server, you can force the network node to be managed by a different PowerVC server. If you choose to do so, the network node might show up on the initial PowerVC server, but you can safely remove the network node from that server if it does.