Creating the management virtual machine

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If you want to run IBM® Power® Virtualization Center in a virtual machine, follow these steps to create a virtual machine on the host. This is the virtual machine into which you will install PowerVC.

Read the following information before you create the virtual machine on your management server.

Installing other software

It is recommended that PowerVC is the only server application hosted on the virtual machine. However, PowerVC can generally coexist with other software on the same instance, assuming that there is no resource or dependency conflict between PowerVC and the other software. Potential conflicts include port contention, user namespace, file system capacity, firewall settings, and so on. It is not recommended that you version lock any RPMs except when directed to do so by IBM support.

Do not install any third party RPM packages prior to installing PowerVC as it might cause conflicts leaving out certain packages that are necessary for successful installation of PowerVC.

You should also consider performance implications to PowerVC and to the other software when installing other software on the same instance. For example, PowerVC memory usage may grow and cause problems with applications that coexist with PowerVC.

PowerVC resource requirements are sized assuming that PowerVC is the only workload that is running on the management instance. If other applications are using resources, adjust the sizing accordingly.

Creating the management virtual machine on PowerVM
Creating the management virtual machine on x86

Creating the management virtual machine on PowerVM

Ensure that you are familiar with the performance and scale considerations for your environment. For details, see the planning topics for your environment.

The virtual machine that you create for PowerVC should have the following resources, at a minimum:

Note: Processor capacity refers to either the number of processor units of entitled capacity or the number of dedicated processors.

Table 1. Minimum space and processor requirements for PowerVC management server - Up to 5 hosts, 2 storage providers, and 2 fabrics
	Recommended
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is larger)	Up to 500	501-1000	1001-2000	2001-3000	3001-6000
Processor capacity	2	4	8	8	12
Virtual CPUs¹	2	4	8	8	12
Memory (GB)	32	35	40	45	55
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
Disk used (GB)	100	120	140	160	180
CPU (MHz)	x86: 2000ppc64le: 2500
1: These can be shared or dedicated. 2: In a case where monitoring is enabled, ensure that sufficient memory and swap space are available along with proportionate changes for other resources as well.

PowerVC has the following space requirements:

/tmp: 250 MB
/usr: 3.5 GiB
/opt: 15 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

To create the virtual machine on a PowerVM® host by using the Hardware Management Console (HMC), complete the following steps:

In the navigation pane, open Systems Management and click Servers.
In the work pane, select the managed system, click the Tasks button, and click Configuration > Create Partition.
Follow the steps in the Create Partition wizard to create a logical partition and a partition profile.

After the virtual machine is created, you need to install the operating system into the management virtual machine.

Creating the management virtual machine on x86