If service is required

During service activities, every attempt is made to keep the system running. However, certain repair procedures require the system to be stopped, restarted, or rebalanced. Such actions should be performed by a customer, hence it is necessary that a customer representative be available during service activities. Without a customer representative available, the IBM® service personnel may have to perform these actions, which results in the system being unavailable to users, and possible disruptions.

Following is a list of replacement procedures for which prerequisite steps must be performed by a customer representative ahead of the service works. Note that scheduling a maintenance window might be required.

Table 1. Prerequisite tasks to be performed by a customer
Service type Prerequisite tasks
All service on system nodes (except power supplies, fans and disk drives), for instance:
  • PCI Adapter (FC or Combo NIC)
  • RAID Controller
  • DIMM
  • CMOS battery
  • VPD card
  • Processor
  • Disk drive backplane
  • Planar (server backplane)
 Disable the node by executing the following steps:
  1. Check the state of the system as system administrator apadmin: 
    [apadmin@node~]# ap state
  2. If the system state is Inactive, no action is required.
  3. If the system state is Ready, check the states of the nodes: 
    [apuser@node~]# ap node
+------------------+---------+-----------+-----------+
| Node             | State   | Monitored | Is Master |
+------------------+---------+-----------+-----------+
| enclosure1.node1 | ENABLED | YES       | YES       |
| enclosure1.node2 | ENABLED | YES       | NO        |
| enclosure1.node3 | ENABLED | YES       | NO        |
+------------------+---------+-----------+-----------+
  4. If the node requiring service is ENABLED, disable the node by running: 
    [apuser@node~]# ap node disable enclosureX.nodeY
    where x is the enclosure number and y is the number of the node being serviced.

    This command stops whatever activity is running on this node, shuts down VMs and takes the server offline. The OpenShift infrastructure will restart the activities as needed.

    When prompted, confirm the action by typing y.

Following are the tasks that need to be performed by the customer representative after the service work is finished.

Table 2. Follow-up tasks performed by a customer
Service type Follow-up tasks
All service on system nodes (except power supplies, fans and disk drives), such as:
  • PCI Adapter (FC or Combo NIC)
  • RAID Controller
  • DIMM
  • CMOS battery
  • VPD card
  • Processor
  • Disk drive backplane
  • Planar (server backplane)
 When you are ready, run the following command: 
[apuser@node~]# ap node rebalance
When prompted, confirm the action by typing y.
When you are ready, use the following command to start the application: 
[root@node~]# apstart