Hardware and software requirements

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The following information provides a consolidated view of the hardware and software requirements for your IBM® Power® Virtualization Center environment.

It is recommended that the software and firmware is at the latest levels.
Notes:
  • Accounts that are used with PowerVC must be configured to use the Bash shell.
  • Make sure that the version of RSCT installed must have the latest fixes applied.
  • Support for software-defined networking has been withdrawn.

Hosts

Table 1. Hardware and operating system requirements for PowerVC hosts.
Host type Supported hardware Supported operating systems
PowerVC management server

ppc64le and x86_64

For POWER8® and POWER9™ - RHEL 8.2, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.5, SLES 15 SP1, and SLES 15 SP2

For x86_64 - RHEL 8.2, RHEL 8.4, and RHEL 8.5

Make sure you install the following RHEL editions.
  • RHEL 8.2, 8.4 (recommended version), or 8.5 - Server edition
  • RHEL 8.2, 8.4 (recommended version), or 8.5 - Server with GUI edition
Note:
  • To enable PowerVC version 2.0.0 installation support for RHEL 8.5, see this technote.
  • Support for PowerVC installation on ppc64BE architecture is being withdrawn.
Managed hosts
IBM POWER7® or later processor classes.
  • Includes all form factors, such as chassis, rack, blade, and Power Flex.
  • All other PowerVC requirements apply, including storage, networking, guests, and so on.
  • Managed hosts should have a minimum of 4 cores and 8 GB of memory.
For more information about the supported guest operating system levels for deployed virtual machines, see Guest operating system support.
Notes:
  • You can manage an HMC host that has a shared memory pool. However, PowerVC does not support deploying or importing a virtual machine that uses shared memory.
  • You can manage a host that is part of Power Enterprise Pool 2.0. PowerVC does not support deploying, migrating, resizing, or remote restart operations for virtual machines with dedicated processors on these hosts. However, you can perform rest of the virtual machine life-cycle operations. Later when you manage the host through a different HMC, the host continues to have the Power Enterprise Pool 2.0 property enabled.
The following information describes the minimum and recommended resources required for PowerVC virtual machines. In the table, the meaning of the Processor capacity column depends on the type of host that is being used as the PowerVC management server.
  • If the PowerVC management server is PowerVM®, Processor capacity refers to either the number of processing units of entitled capacity or the number of dedicated processors.
  • If the PowerVC management server is x86 Processor capacity refers to the number of physical cores.
Table 2. Minimum space and processor requirements for PowerVC management server - Up to 5 hosts, 2 storage providers, and 2 fabrics
  Minimum Recommended
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is larger)   Up to 500 501-1000 1001-2000 2001-3000 3001-6000
Processor capacity 1 2 4 8 8 12
Virtual CPUs1 2 2 4 8 8 12
Memory (GB) 24 32 35 40 45 55
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
Disk used (GB) 80 100 120 140 160 180

1: These can be shared or dedicated.

Table 3. Minimum space and processor requirements for PowerVC management server - More than 5 hosts2, 2 storage providers, and 2 fabrics
  Minimum Recommended
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is larger)   Up to 500 501-1000 1001-2000 2001-3000 3001-6000 6001-10000
Processor capacity 1 2 4 8 8 12 12
Virtual CPUs1 2 2 4 8 8 12 12
Memory (GB) 24 50 60 75 80 85 100
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
Disk used (GB) 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

1: These can be shared or dedicated.

2: You can scale up to 50 hosts and the memory requirement can vary based on host, storage and fabric combination.

  
Note: For larger environments or to minimize the "noisy neighbor" effect, you should consider using dedicated processors.
PowerVC has the following space requirements:
  • /tmp: 250 MB
  • /usr: 3.5 GiB
  • /opt: 5 GiB
  • /srv: 2 GiB
  • /var: 3 GiB
It is recommended that 20% of the disk space is assigned to /var.
Note: The values given for space requirements might differ because the powervc-diag generated log archive size depends on the following parameters
  • Number of HMC or NovaLink managed hosts
  • Duration of PowerVC run time
  • Size of each log file that powervc-diag collects

OpenStack release

PowerVC version 2.0.1 is built on OpenStack Ussuri release.

Guest operating system support

This table lists the support for virtual machine operating systems on managed hosts.
Table 4. Guest operating system support
Operating system Little endian (LE) or big endian (BE) Version
AIX® BE

7.1 TL0, SP0

7.2 TL0, SP0

Note: For secure boot, 7.2 TL3 on POWER9 with firmware 920 and HMC V9R1.xxx with latest fixes.
IBM i BE

7.2 TR1

7.3 TR3

7.4

Version 7.2 TR8, 7.3 TR4 is required for POWER9
RHEL LE

RHEL 7.6-ALT

7.8

7.9

8.0, 8.1, 8.2, and 8.4
SLES LE 12 and 15

SLES 15 SP1 and SLES 15 SP2
Ubuntu LE

18.04

Hardware Management Console

Table 5. HMC requirements
Item Requirement
Software level
PowerVC supports the following HMC releases:
  • V9.1.941
  • V9.1.942
  • V9.2.950
  • V9.2.951
  • V9.2.952.2
Note: For supported HMC hardware levels, see Recommended Fixes - HMC Code Upgrades.

PowerVM NovaLink

NovaLink 2.0.0 is supported on these operating systems:
  • Ubuntu 18.04 with latest fixes.
  • RHEL 8.2 and RHEL 8.3 (LE)
For further details, see the NovaLink hardware and software requirements page.
The amount of memory needed by one NovaLink partition depends on how many virtual machines it is going to host:
Table 6. Amount of memory needed for one NovaLink partition
Number of virtual machines Up to 250 251-500 More than 500
RHEL 8.2 - Memory needed in a standard environment (GB) 8 14 18
Ubuntu 18.04 - Memory needed in a standard environment (GB) 2.5 5 10

Virtual I/O Server

Notes:
  • PowerVC does not install or configure third-party software on the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).  Any third-party software that you want to use for VIOS resources must be installed and configured on the VIOS before managing it with PowerVC.
  • A minimum of 6GB memory is required for VIOS 3.1.x.

For VIOS sizing requirements when using SR-IOV, see IBM PowerVM Best Practices.

Table 7. Supported virtualization platforms.
Platform Requirement
Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)
  • Version 3.1.0
  • Version 3.1.1
  • Version 3.1.2
  • Version 3.1.3

Network

Table 8. Supported network hardware and software
Item Requirement
Network switches PowerVC does not manage network switches, but supports network configurations that use VLAN-capable switches.
Virtual networks Supports Shared Ethernet Adapters for virtual machine networking.

Supports SR-IOV based vNICs on PowerVM .

PowerVC can be installed on a system with IPv4 stack. PowerVC uses the default network interface, eth0. To use a different network interface, set the HOST_INTERFACE environment variable before running the install script. Otherwise, the installer auto-selects eth0 and uses whichever stack is set up for that interface. As long as connectivity exists, hosts and storage of either type can be registered and managed with PowerVC. That is, PowerVC can communicate with hosts and storage over IPv4 addresses.

Notes:
  • PowerVC version 2.0.1 does not support IPv6.
  • Make sure that the management system has DNS properly configured so that hostname and management IP are resolvable. You can check /etc/resolv.conf file whether correct DNS server information is provided and it is functional. If the hostname resolution does not happen, you can resolve it locally by mentioning the hostname and IP mapping in the /etc/hosts file as below:
    x.x.x.x hostname short_hostname
Table 9. Types of networking supported on PowerVC
IPv4 Support
Management Server Virtual Machine deployed by PowerVC
Yes Yes

Fabrics

PowerVC supports up to 25 fabrics.
Table 10. Supported fabric drivers
Supported Driver Documentation
Brocade Brocade zone driver system requirements
Virtual fabric support is included.
Note: Brocade zone OpenStack driver for Ussuri release is supported for PowerVC.
Cisco Cisco Fibre Channel Zone Driver

VSAN support is included.
Pluggable A pluggable fabric is an OpenStack supported fabric. Any fabric supported by an OpenStack driver can be registered with PowerVC, but the level of functionality that it has within PowerVC depends on the driver. See Planning for storage for details.
Note: PowerVC supports calling the pluggable driver function, but not the driver itself. Issues traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device will be referred to the device vendor.

Storage drivers

Some storage drivers support different devices depending on the OpenStack release.

Table 11. Supported storage drivers
Supported Driver Documentation
Hitachi Enterprise Hitachi Block Storage Driver (HBSD) 10.0.0

Supported devices are listed in the Hitachi Block Storage Driver for OpenStack v 10.0.0 Release Notes®.
IBM System Storage® DS8000® IBM Storage volume driver

For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
PowerMAX (VMAX)

Dell EMC VMAX iSCSI and FC drivers

Support for EMC Hybrid VMAX3 is deprecated. Also, SMI-S Provider management and EMC VMAX2 arrays are no longer supported..
EMC VNX Dell EMC VNX driver
IBM Storwize® family

IBM SVC

IBM Storwize family and SVC volume driver

IBM Storwize family overview

IBM Flash System v9000 Overview

For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
IBM XIV® Storage System, IBM FlashSystem A9000, or IBM FlashSystem A9000R IBM Storage volume driver

Lifecycle and support matrix

For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
Note: Unless stated otherwise, all references to XIV Storage System in this guide relate all members of the Spectrum Accelerate Family (XIV Storage System, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystem A9000, or FlashSystem A9000R).
Pure Storage For more information on supported models, see Pure Storage iSCSI and Fibre Channel volume drivers
Pluggable A pluggable storage device is an OpenStack supported storage device. Any storage device supported by an OpenStack driver can be registered with PowerVC, but the level of functionality that it has within PowerVC depends on the driver. See Planning for storage for details.
Note: PowerVC supports calling the pluggable driver function, but not the driver itself. Issues traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device will be referred to the device vendor.
Note: For information about storage support on IBM i, refer to the IBM i POWER® External Storage Support Matrix Summary.

Security

Table 12. Supported security software
Item Requirement More information
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server (optional) OpenLDAP 2.0 OpenLDAP
Microsoft Active Directory 2016 Active Directory Domain Services
IBM Security Directory Suite 8.0.1 IBM Security Directory Suite

Web browsers

  • Mozilla Firefox ESR 83
    Note: PowerVC does not load if Ask me every time is selected as the custom history setting.
  • Google Chrome, version 86.0.4240.198
  • Microsoft Edge version 86.0.622.58 (official build) (64-bit) and above
  • Safari, version 12
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