Optimizing data when creating a system plan on the HMC

The quantity and quality of hardware information that the HMC can capture in a new system plan varies based on your version of the HMC and the operating environment of the logical partition for which you are capturing information.

The data that you bring into the System Planning Tool (SPT) is only as good as the data that you capture when you create your system plan.

Operating environment affect the quantity of hardware information in a system plan that you create. You can capture more data for logical partitions that run IBM® i than for logical partitions that run on the AIX®, or Linux® operating system.

Depending on the code level of your HMC, the HMC can use different methods to capture data about the hardware on your system, as the following table describes.

Table 1. Hardware information captured in a system plan based on available collection methods
Method	Information captured
Inventory gathering	Hardware assigned to active logical partitions
Hardware discovery	Hardware assigned to inactive logical partitions or hardware that is not assigned to a logical partition
Enhanced hardware discovery	Hardware assigned to inactive logical partitions or hardware that is not assigned to a logical partition The information captured also includes SCSI disk drives on POWER8® processor-based servers, and later, for logical partitions that do not run IBM i. You must convert the system plan into SPT to see this information.