Adding resources to PowerVC

Edit online

After you register your initial hosts, networks, and optionally, storage and fabrics, with PowerVC, you can add additional hosts, networks, fabrics, and storage. You can also add existing virtual machines or volumes to your environment so that you can use PowerVC to manage those virtual machines or volumes.

You can add more hosts and networks at any time on the Home page or by clicking Add on the Hosts or Networks page.

Note: In a PowerVC multinode environment:

Adding or removing of host and storage is not supported when one of the controller nodes is down.
It is recommended to wait for success or failure message about resource addition or removal before you attempt to perform any similar action.

Adding fabrics

To add more fabrics, click Add Fabric on the Fabrics tab of the Storage page. You can add any combination of PowerVC-supported fabrics. However, you cannot add both pluggable fabrics and fabrics for which there is integrated support.

PowerVC supports a total of 25 total fabrics. Each Virtual Fabric counts toward this total. The number of Virtual Fabrics that you can create depends on the switch model.

Adding storage

To use more Storage area network (SAN) storage, add it as a storage provider on the Overview tab on the Home page. Shared storage pool providers are not added this way. They are registered with PowerVC automatically when you add a host that has one or more Virtual I/O Servers that are active members of a Virtual I/O Server cluster and the cluster has a backing shared storage pool.

Note: If Virtual I/O Servers have been removed from the cluster and each of those Virtual I/O Servers is in a healthy state, then PowerVC automatically removes the shared storage pool provider. However, if the Virtual I/O Servers have been removed from the cluster and one of those Virtual I/O Servers is shut down, then the shared storage pool provider is not automatically removed. This is because the cluster might become active again after the Virtual I/O Server partition or partitions are reactivated.

If a shared storage pool provider is removed, then the default storage connectivity group for the provider is also automatically removed.

When you register a new storage provider, a storage template and a storage connectivity group are automatically created for that provider. To add an extra SAN switch, use the Fabrics tab on the Storage page.

To create a volume, use the Storage volumes page.

Note: When creating a volume for pluggable storage, the volume type, storage pool, real size, real capacity, and projected usage will not be shown because PowerVC does not have access to that information. Because this information cannot be verified, it is possible that volume creation might fail.