Distributing NIM resources

Usually, a NIM administrator will use the NIM master as the server for all resources. This strategy keeps all resources together on one machine. However, there are several reasons to distribute resources onto client machines.

• If the NIM environment requires several large resources to be defined, it may not be possible to put them all on the same server because of disk space limitations. Creating resources on different machines allows the burden of disk consumption to be distributed over several machines.
• Serving resources from different machines helps avoid bottlenecks when performing NIM operations on large numbers of clients. Bottlenecks can occur on server machines or on network gateways, so it may be beneficial to distribute resources across servers running in different subnets.
• Multiple resources of the same type can be created on different machines to increase the availability of resources when servers are taken offline for scheduled maintenance.
• Some SPOT resources at certain levels cannot be served by some machines at certain levels. Specifically, SPOT creation is not supported when the level of AIX® installed in the SPOT is higher than the level of AIX running on the server. When you are creating SPOTs at multiple levels, it may be necessary to distribute the SPOTs on different servers.

Distributing resources on different machines in the NIM environment is simply a matter of specifying the correct server information when the resource is defined. After the resources are created, they are used no differently than resources defined on the master.