Roles of the HMC

The HMC plays many different roles in the management of system resources. There are security aspects for almost all of these roles. The major roles of the HMC are as follows:
  • User operational control
  • Automated operational control
  • Service and support.

Each of these roles has security implications that customers must consider to ensure that the HMC adheres to their security requirements. Before you discuss the security aspects of each of these roles, it would be worthwhile to mention one of the HMC's security tenets: Any configurable feature of the HMC that might raise security concerns is always disabled by default. This approach forces the system administrator to think about each of these features when explicitly enabling them.

Note: When the HMC is upgraded from one version to another, the previous configurable settings are saved and restored. Thus, in the case of an upgrade, all configurable features that safeguard security are not disabled by default; the settings are retained from the previous version.