Reducing space requirements for NIM resources

It is not unusual for resources such as the SPOT and lpp_source to take several hundred megabytes of storage space on a NIM server. You can reduce space consumption significantly on resource servers by creating /usr SPOTs and defining CD-ROM file-system directories as lpp_sources.

A /usr SPOT can be created from the /usr file system of the NIM master or any NIM client. The AIX® system files for the BOS are already installed, so only software for additional device support will be added to the system. The resulting system ultimately has more software installed on it than it needs to run, but far less disk space is used than otherwise would have been, had a non-/usr SPOT been created on the same system. For more information on creating /usr SPOT resources, see Using the SPOT resource and Defining /usr versus non-/usr SPOTs.

A directory on the AIX product CD can be mounted and defined as an lpp_source, eliminating the need to copy installation images to the hard disk of a resource server. The defined lpp_source contains all the images available on the CD, but the CD must remain mounted at the server for the lpp_source to be usable in NIM operations. For more information about using a CD-ROM file system as an lpp_source, see Defining an lpp_source on DVD-ROM versus hard disk.