Managing physical I/O adapters
You can view and change physical I/O adapter assignment for a partition by using the Hardware Management Console (HMC).
You can dynamically add, remove, and move physical I/O devices and slots, to and from running partitions, by using an HMC. You can share infrequently used I/O devices, such as optical disk drives among multiple partitions.
You can specify that I/O devices or slots are required for a partition. If you specify that an I/O device or slot is not required, the I/O device or slot can be shared with other partitions, or the I/O device or slot is optional. If you specify that an I/O device or slot is required (or dedicated) and if the I/O device or slot is unavailable, or is in use by another partition, you cannot activate the partition.
You can specify a timeout value in the Timeout field. You can also click the Force option to force a particular operation to be performed on the logical partition immediately.