Hardware Management Console characteristics

The Hardware Management Console (HMC) acts as the operational focal point for one or multiple IBM Z mainframes, that are attached to a mainframe cluster. Likewise, SA z/OS can control multiple IBM Z mainframes with a single connection to an HMC over IP. The HMC gets its CPC and LPAR resources and status information from the Support Elements (SE) of the IBM Z mainframes in the cluster, once the CPC's SE IP addresses are defined or discovered.

In a cluster, you can simultaneously use more than one HMC that have the same or different set of CPCs defined. If one HMC fails, you can use another available one in the cluster to continue operation. This HMC backup scheme can also be configured and used with SA z/OS. If an SE in the cluster is unavailable, its CPC and LPAR information is not available to all HMCs in the cluster.

You can have your HMCs connected to the mainframe IBM processor LAN, your IP business network, or both. In BCP internal interface (BCPii) transport configurations, as an alternative to the IP protocol, HMCs are used to route BCPii requests and responses between the originator and target CPC Support Elements. This function must be enabled on the HMCs that are supposed to build a redundant BCPii routing pool. Only CPCs in the defined CPC group of the participating HMCs will benefit from BCPii routing. BCPii routing is completely transparent to SA z/OS and the console SNMP APIs. It is an embedded IBM Z mainframe LAN function.