Planning the installation of PowerHA SystemMirror for Linux

Before you install PowerHA® SystemMirror® in your Linux environments, you must ensure that all prerequisites are met.

Packaging

You can download PowerHA SystemMirror for Linux from the IBM® website.

The PowerHA Linux release package for the Service Pack is similar to the base build. As there is no difference between the installation of the SP build with respect to the base build and fresh installation of SP build, you do not need to install the base build initially.

Prerequisites

You must fulfill the software and hardware requirements for PowerHA SystemMirror for Linux. Before you install the PowerHA SystemMirror on a Linux system, you must meet the following prerequisites:
  • Root authority is required to install PowerHA SystemMirror.
  • The following scripting package is required in each SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system:
    • KSH93 (ksh-93vu-18.1.ppc64le) for SLES and KSH93 (ksh-20120801) for RHEL
    • PERL
    • lvm2

    You must use the Korn shell version ksh93vu suggested by SUSE. Download the KSH93 package from the SUSE website. The downloaded files contain the source package for the ksh-93vu-18.1.src.rpm files that must be compiled to get the ksh-93vu-18.1.ppc64le.rpm files. To know more about RPM packages, refer to the SUSE technical notes (Section 6.2.6 Installing and Compiling Source Packages) in the SUSE Documentation website.

  • The following packages are required in the RHEL system:
    • bzip2
    • nfs-utils
    • perl-Pod-Parser
    • bind-utils
  • Additionally, the following packages must be installed in RHEL systems for disk heartbeat configuration:
    • lsscsi
    • sg3_utils
  • The servicelog package is required in SLES15 systems.

Checking prerequisites

To verify whether all prerequisites are met, complete the following steps:
  1. Log in as root user.
  2. After you have downloaded the tar file from the IBM website, extract the tar file by entering the following command:
    tar -xvf <tar file>
  3. Enter the following command:
    cd PHAxxxxLinux64

    where, xxxx is the PowerHA SystemMirror for Linux version. For example, 7230 for PowerHA SystemMirror Version 7.2.3 for Linux.

  4. To start the prerequisites check, enter the following command:
    ./installPHA --onlyprereqcheck
  5. When the check is complete, check the following log file for information about missing prerequisites:
    /tmp/installPHA.<#>.log
    The hashtag (<#>) is a number; the highest number identifies the most recent log file.
  6. If your system did not pass the prerequisites check, correct any problems before you start the installation.