AIX

Hi everyone,

We had a power outage few days ago, and I got the servers up and running but I was informed to look into, if there is a way to bring up the servers automatically/defaultly.

I was told the windows admin has their server set up where the servers are up automatically if there is a power outage.. manager told me "look in to the Bios". I didn't know what that meant, but only stuff I found was on windows servers....
I found this link but it talks about dell server.

East Bay Solutions :: Automatically turning computer back on after power outage

Any information will be greatly appreciated.

There is usually a BIOS setting for "turn on after power loss", yes. It's a setting in the motherboard itself which you get into via a menu before the OS even boots. This makes it highly system-specific as well, some systems use F10 on boot to get to that menu, some use F2, some use DEL, etc, and where the option is found also varies. You'll have to research and explore.

Unfortunately, since the BIOS settings are very often corrupted and reset to defaults in power loss situations, the BIOS "power on after power loss" setting is very untrustworthy anyway.

There was one model of PC back in 1997 which had a switch on the motherboard to configure behavior after power loss. They're the only computers I've encountered which I could actually trust to do so.

I hope I have uploaded two files - one titled autostartPolicypng and the other is startpolicy.png

These are screencaptures from the web-based ASMI - Advanced System Management Interface. I do not have an HMC, so I use the web interface. HMC would have a different way to change these.

Approach ASMI as the system firmware IP address as https://IP_addressOrHostname and login.

Now you should see - on the left - an area titled "Power/Restart Control".
The panel entitled "Power On/Off System" has a selection entitled "System firmware start policy". This is (mainly) for a normal startup.

The choice you want to look at is in the left menu as: "Auto Power Restart". Make sure this is enabled.

HOWEVER, if you system is managed by an HMC all partitions get started, more or less in parallel - so the ones that are dependent on a VIOS may not start as expected. When you do not have an HMC - the VIOS - as IVM (integrated Virtualization Manager) has that role and will start client partitions AFTER it has started itself - and so the system returns as much as possible (depending mainly on the integrity/availability of external storage).

Short advice: get on the ASMI web interface and make you adjustments. Or use the HMC to do the same.

Hope this helps!

Michael

That helps yes, but is ASMI web interface a IBM tool or Third party free source? how can i get this? can i get this even if i have HMC? stupid question but how can I bring this up to my manager...?

might all be easy questions to answer but i just want to not look stupid when bringing it up to my manager.

Thanks again

Once you find a way to automatically restart the system, you still have to decide if you should.
Assuming you have a UPS.
Does the UPS trigger the system to shutdown, and if so after what percentage of battery life is used?
Does the system just continue to run until the battery is dead?
Does the UPS restore power to the system if the battery is less than xx% charged?
Do you know how many power failures you have per year, and how many of these exceed the battery life?
If you do decide to automatically restart the system, you should make sure that you wait until the power supply is stable.

There is no UPS.

You need to have a really long talk with your boss.
In our house, my wife says I'm cheap; however, I prefer to say frugal.