Do you have some internal disk in the CEC? If so, then you might have a chance, but you will be pretty limited with space unless you can add some SAN disk, or perhaps cable up a local SCSI array.

If the CEC has already been used it will remember what it was and perhaps partitions allocated, so you might need to find your way through the Service Processor menus to 'Reset to Factory Settings' or something like that to clear out any definitions of LPARs, devices, HMCs etc.

Don't leap into that though. I've never done it and it would be worth waiting for other opinions to ensure that you don't break something else by doing this. I suppose if you have a hardware support contract, they might be able to verify what the CEC is capable of and guide you through firing up for the 'first time' so you can install.

Another thing to try is to plug a laptop into the port marked HMC1. Set the laptop to be a DHCP server and then open a browser https session to the IP address allocated to the CEC (although I must admit I don't know how to determine this) This will hopefully bring up the ASMI page from where you can explore a bit too.

I must admit that I'm a bit sketchy, because it's not really the sort of thing one does very often, if ever.


I hope that this helps,
Robin