Defining sections in the zipl environment file

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 LPAR mode z/VM guest KVM guest

You can define a section for each of your failover sites in a zipl environment file.

About this task

To create sections for use with a failover solution, edit the environment file, by default located at /etc/ziplenv, to contain a section for each failover site. Then install the boot record by running the zipl command. The installation procedure maps the sections to name spaces in the environment block.

Sections must start with a title of the form [site <x>], where

  • <x> is a numeral in the range 0 - 9.
  • The "site" keyword is not case sensitive.
  • The title must be enclosed in square brackets.

All lines between consecutive titles form one section. Sections with identical titles are considered one, compound section. The final section extends to the end of the file.

Kernel parameters that are defined before the first section are considered common to all sections.

Tip: Specify any common kernel parameters first, followed by one or more sections.

Procedure

As an example, consider adding two sites, site 1 and site 2, to the following zipl environment file: 

ROOT=/dev/dasda1
CRASH=256M
PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=8
PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=9
RESERVED=
...
Assume you want to use the different PANIC_TIMEOUT values for different sites. Add section titles for the sites:

ROOT=/dev/dasda1
CRASH=256M
[site 1]
PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=8
[site 2]
PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=9
RESERVED=
...
Now the ROOT= and the CRASH= keyword-value pairs are common to all sites. PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=8 applies to site 1 only, and PANIC_TIMEOUT=panic=9 and RESERVED= apply to site 2.

What to do next

You can now: