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 collects information about the managed systems (hosts), VIOS, and logical partitions (LPARs) that can be managed by the KSYS. For example, the HMC collects information about the system processor, system memory, hardware, worldwide port name (WWPN) of the physical Fibre Channel adapter. The HMC also checks for VIOS capability for disaster recovery operations.

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.

The HMC provides the Representational State Transfer (REST) application program interfaces (APIs) to KSYS to perform the following functions:

• Checks system capability for each operation.
• Collects information about the host state, LPAR state, VIOS state, and the IP addresses of the host, VIOS, and LPAR that KSYS 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.
• Cleans up the data and workload-related information from the primary site and saves the data in the KSYS data store.