Restoring the Virtual I/O Server

The Virtual I/O Server contains the following types of information that you need to restore: the Virtual I/O Server itself and user-defined virtual devices.

• The Virtual I/O Server includes the base code, applied fix packs, custom device drivers to support disk subsystems, and some user-defined metadata. All of this information is restored when you use the installios command. In situations where you restore the Virtual I/O Server to the same system on which it was backed up, then restoring only the Virtual I/O Server itself is usually sufficient.
• User-defined virtual devices include metadata, such as virtual devices mappings, that define the relationship between the physical environment and the virtual environment. You can use this data to recreate the virtual devices. In situations where you restore the Virtual I/O Server to a new or different system (for example, in the event of a system failure or disaster), then you need to restore the Virtual I/O Server and recreate the virtual devices. Furthermore, in these situations, you also need to restore the following components of your environment in order to fully recover your Virtual I/O Server configuration:
  • External device configurations, such as Storage Area Network (SAN) devices.
  • Resources defined on the Hardware Management Console (HMC), such as processor and memory allocations. This means restoring your HMC partition profile data for the Virtual I/O Server and its client partitions.
  • The operating systems and applications running in the client logical partitions.

You can back up and restore the Virtual I/O Server as follows: