Example: SCSI IPL of an LPAR

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You can perform an IPL of an LPAR from a SCSI disk.

Procedure

Follow these steps to IPL an LPAR from a SCSI disk:
  1. Once the SCSI IPL feature is active, the SE or HMC display an enhanced load panel as shown in Figure 1.
    Figure 1. Load panel

    Screenshot of the Load panel on the HMC
    (If the SCSI IPL feature is not enabled, some fields are not visible.) The SE remembers the last set of specified IPL parameters. It is also possible to set the SCSI IPL parameters within the activation profile.
  2. Specify IPL parameters (see SCSI IPL parameters) and click OK. The operating system starts.

Results

The only difference to a system that uses CCW IPL are the two messages:
  • MLOEVL012I: Machine loader up and running.
  • MLOPDM003I: Machine loader finished, moving data to final storage location.
Figure 2. Example of a SCSI IPL

Screenshot showing the messages during an IPL from a SCSI device

Figure 2 shows the boot messages.

The kernel parameters show that the root file system of this Linux® instance is on a SCSI disk (/dev/sda1). Production systems should not use /dev/sda1 as a root device, but use multi-pathing overlying the SCSI devices. See your distribution's documentation for how to set up multi-pathing.

In Figure 1, noresume has been typed into the Operating system specific load parameters field. In Figure 2 this specification has been concatenated to the end of the existing boot parameters used by the boot configuration. This causes a regular boot process, even if the Linux instance had previously been suspended to a swap partition.