Hardware Management Console (HMC)

The controller system (KSYS) interacts with the HMC for processes that involve host, Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), and disk subsystem resources. These processes include discovery, monitoring, recovery, and cleanup.

The HMC is a virtual as well as a physical appliance that is used to manage the IBM Power systems servers (hosts), VIOS, and logical partitions (LPARs) that can be managed by the KSYS.

The HMC provides Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) to the KSYS subsystem. The KSY subsystem performs various configuration and operation tasks by using the REST API.

The KSYS subsystem collects all details from HMC about managed systems, Virtual I/O Servers (VIOSes), and virtual machines by using the REST API queries. The KSYS subsystem also collects detailed information about system processor, system memory, hardware, worldwide port name (WWPN) of the physical Fibre Channel (FC) adapter from HMC. The KSYS subsystem performs the following operations from HMC by using the REST API:

• Checks system capability for each operation.
• Periodically collects information about the host state, LPAR state, VIOS state, and the IP addresses of the host, VIOS, and LPAR that KSYS subsystem can use for subsequent monitoring.
• Provides the disk mapping information to the VIOS in the backup site.
• Validates the backup site by checking whether the destination hosts are capable of the remote restart operation.
• Provides appropriate return codes to KSYS, so that KSYS can perform the required recovery actions.
• Cleans up disk mapping information in VIOS when the mapping information is no longer required.

To ensure enhanced availability, you can configure dual Hardware Management Consoles in your environment. In this case, if one HMC is down or unreachable, the KSYS can use another configured HMC to collect the required information.