Controller system (KSYS)
The controlling system, also called KSYS, is a fundamental component in the IBM® VM Recovery Manager DR for Power Systems (VM Recovery Manager DR) solution. It provides a single point of control for the entire environment managed by the VM Recovery Manager DR solution.
The KSYS cannot be affected by errors that can cause an outage in the production systems. Therefore, the KSYS must be self-contained and share a minimum number of resources with the production system. Ensure that you deploy the KSYS in the backup site so that the KSYS is isolated from any issues or failure in the active site. In the VM Recovery Manager DR solution, the KSYS must have an out-of-band deployment in its own logical partition that must be running on AIX Version 7.2 with the 7200-01 Technology Level, or later.
The following figure shows a logical interaction between the KSYS and other physical components of the VM Recovery Manager DR solution:
The KSYS is responsible for recovery actions if a disaster or a potential disaster occurs. Therefore, the availability of KSYS is a fundamental requirement of the solution. The KSYS must be deployed in the backup site. The KSYS must remain operational even if the active site fails or if the disks located in the active site fail.
The KSYS constantly monitors the production environment for any unplanned outage that affects the production site or the disk subsystems. If an unplanned outage occurs, the KSYS analyzes the situation to determine the status of the production environment. When a site fails, the KSYS notifies the administrator about the failure. If the failure is severe, the administrator can initiate a site takeover. The KSYS pauses the processing of the data replication to ensure secondary data consistency and to process the site takeover.
The KSYS handles discovery, verification, monitoring, notification, and recovery operations to support disaster recovery for the VM Recovery Manager DR solution. The KSYS interacts with the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to collect configuration information of the managed systems. The KSYS interacts with the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) through the HMC to obtain storage configuration information of the virtual machines. The KSYS also provides storage replication management and Capacity on Demand (CoD) management.
You can configure the KSYS by using the ksysmgr command. The ksysmgr command has the following format:
ksysmgr ACTION CLASS [NAME] [ATTRIBUTES...]
Security implementation for the KSYS subsystem
The KSYS subsystem runs in an AIX logical partition (LPAR). You can customize security for this LPAR as per the AIX security requirements of your organization.
The KSYS management is enabled only for the root user in the KSYS LPAR. The KSYS subsystem does not communicate to any external systems except HMC, Storage subsystem and ksysmgr.
The KSYS subsystem uses REST APIs to communicate to HMC. You must enable HTTPS in your environment for REST API communication.
The KSYS subsystem communicates to the storage subsystems by using APIs provided by the storage vendors. Refer to storage vendor documentation for any specific security requirements of these APIs.
The ksysmgr is the command-line interface (CLI) that communicates to the KSYS subsystem. You can configure and view the status of the KSYS subsystem and its resource by using the ksysmgr CLI.