AIX

Have been learning a lot off late and am a little unclear about the VIOS setup particularly with regards to redundancy. Would appreciate your help.

My question is very basic. Lets say I have setup a VIOS and 3 LPARs on only one hdd (non scsi). On what do I setup the second VIOS? Could I for instance, use an external hdd? Do both the VIO servers need to have the same adapters?I know the steps on setting it up on the HMC but am not clear and trying to understand the underlying architecture (actual and virtual). Thanks for your help.

Each VIOS must have separate hardware resources within the same CEC / system.
If you have used a VIOS LV for your client disk then you should do the same on the second VIOS and then use AIX LVM mirroring on the client to mirror the disks from the two VIOS partitions.
It is explained in the powervm redbook:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247940.pdf

HI and thanks for the reply and the link. My understanding is that one could use two disks with two different scsi adapters and mirror them in the client(LPAR). Or use priorities as well. But in the case of the former, I am wondering about the actual hardware itself. Do both the adapters have to be the same? Can I have VIOS1 with a scsi adapter and the VIOS2 with an ide sata or a simple external hdd connected with a serial cable for instance? Am talking about a simple setup for learning purposes....dont have access to any servers yet and am trying to understand more about the h/w. Thanks for your help.

As far as I remember the two back end disks can be what ever you like, one internal VIOS LV and the other a separate scsi, ide, SAN, anything.
Then as you say use the client to mirror the data.

Thanks for the reply and help. Im gonna try out a few things this week. I will have access to a p4 machine...thx again...

You will probably not be able to use your new knowledge, because DLPARing will - IIRC - not work on a P4 system (like, for instance, a p690), because the hypervisor doesn't support it.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

DLPAR - dynamic logical partition, is OK on p4 but
PowerVM / VIOS / IVM requires p5 or higher.