IBM Power Virtual Server maintenance operations overview

Data center maintenance

IBM maintains its data centers by updating the network components, storage systems, and compute server infrastructure. Your workloads usually remain unaffected during the data center maintenance. Power Virtual Server maintenance includes hosts, dedicated hosts, storage, and network infrastructure resources. The maintenance ensures that the IBM Power technology stack remains secure and up-to-date with appropriate security fixes and feature updates.

Most updates do not affect the workloads that are running on the Power Virtual Server. If the maintenance is expected to affect your workloads, IBM notifies you in advance.

Host maintenance

Host maintenance activities, such as firmware updates, require a live partition migration of a virtual service instance (VSI) from the compute host to another host. In such cases, the VSIs continue to run without interruption. Therefore, IBM does not send a notification. For more information, see Viewing notifications.

When you use the VSI pinning options, the VSI's availability during maintenance activities is affected. VSI pinning prevents Power Virtual Server from migrating the VSI to another host during the maintenance operation. As a result, the live migration of the VSI is not possible, and the VSI must be in the Shutoff state for the host maintenance operation to complete. Therefore, you must use the VSI pinning options cautiously. Any downtime that is caused by VSI pinning during the host maintenance is excluded from the service-level agreements. For more information, see Service Level Agreements for IBM Cloud.

For more information about VSI pinning, see What does VSI pinning do?.

Network maintenance

Power Virtual Server infrastructure includes redundant network paths that support nondisruptive network maintenance. Network maintenance operation targets only one network fabric at a time from the set of redundant network fabrics. When one of the network fabrics is under maintenance, the network automatically redirects traffic to the alternate fabric. Some network packet loss might occur during any traffic rerouting, including when traffic is redirected from one network fabric to another.

If you use IBM Cloud Connections instead of Power Edge Router (PER), you must configure two Cloud Connections to reduce network disruptions during the maintenance activities. For more information about how to migrate to PER, see Migrating to PER.

Storage maintenance

Power Virtual Server infrastructure provides redundant storage I/O paths that allow nondisruptive upgrades of the storage hardware. During the storage maintenance, some of the redundant paths become temporarily unavailable. This behavior aligns with the standard multipath I/O management practices that are supported by AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. Refer to your operating system guidelines for information about the multipath I/O management during the maintenance events.

Verify that all the disk paths are online after maintenance. If any disk paths remain offline, initiate an operating system device scan to restore the offline paths.