Assuming that you are licenced and can get the VIO install media, this may also be a lot of work, i.e. a server re-build. The way I have it is that the VIO software runs natively on the server. From that guests are created, rather than being true LPARs, much like in the old VM/MVS days on the IBM mainframes. Typically you would install VM as a hypervisor and then have users defined there that actually ran your VM or MVS that the business wanted to use.
I fear you may need to:-
- Collect your volume group information with savevg to a file within rootvg
- Backup your rootvg to removable media with mksysb
- Test your entire restore on a spare/borrowed/DR-contracted server if you can before proceeding!
- Install/overwrite your entire server with the VIO software
- Create an LPAR and allocate disk through the VIO (browser access to this, and it looks very HMC-like)
- Insert your mksysb and attach it to the LPAR
- Activate the LPAR and recover from your mksysb
- Restore you volume groups with restvg using the files you saved earlier
- Restore your data
- Hope that you did it all correctly.
You will have to consider:-
- Additional IP addresses
- How/where you will create and allocate virtual disk to your LPARs and therefore .....
- The impact of losing a real disk at the VIO level.
On the last point, I have inherited a bad design, such that a disk failure will knock out half the hdisks in all the LPARs we have defined. You will need at least 4 real disks in your server, two will be for the VIO operating system, two to create logical disks for your LPARs. Of course, if you can SAN connect, then the requirement for disks may be mitigated by hardware redundancy in the SAN definitions of the LUNs. We have LVM mirrors on the LPARs, but there would be a lot of work to replace a single real disk failure. There are ways to mirror at the VIO server level, but that was missed by us, so we have a bit of a mess.
I don't want to worry you unnecessarily, but you need to understand that it's not a trivial matter to convert.
I hope that this helps in your planning.
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK