UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi Experts,

I am very new to AIX, I have a mksysb image in one of my aix server (V6), I would like to install this mksysb image on newly lpar. Is it possible without tape and NIM?

Advice would be appreciated.

Regards,
Rockie

Hello aix.rockie, and welcome.

Don't worry about being new, we all were once. Let's see if we can help you.

What is your mksysb image stored on?

When you activate an LPAR, you will be able to interrupt the process and choose to boot from a variety of devices, such as hard disk (an installed OS), tape, CD (or DVD) network (NIM boot) etc. You have to get your mksysb image available as one of these.

What would work for you?

What else do you have on the physical server?



Robin

Sure you can burn the image in DVD and use it (as rbattel mentioned).

Use mkdvd command for it.

Thanks Robin & ibmtech

we have a p740 with single vios and 6 lpars on that. we have mksysb image on lpar. We are about to create new lpar on that we have to install.

Thanks,
Rockie

Do you have a DVD writer? If you can assign that to the LPAR with the mksysb image, you would then:-

Code:

cfgmgr -S
lsdev -C|grep cd
mkdvd -d /dev/cd0 -m /mksysbfs/mksysb.file
rmdev -dl cd0

I'm assuming that the DVD writer is detected as cd0

Use DVD-RAM media, not DVD-R, DVD-ROM or DVD-RW.


To get you round your request short term, you can make a virtual optical device on the VIO server and assign that. The same commands on the LPAR with the mksysb image file.


Two important points:-I hope that these suggestions help. Let us know what you plan to do and how you get on, or if neither of these is viable.



Robin

Thanks Robin for the quick response with the great explanations.

We are creating this for some testing purpose, we are hoping to do this next week with writing mksysb on the DVD as you said.

Thanks
Rockie

Annoyingly, you can't write direct from the mksysb command like you can with tape and the write might take 3 hours by the way. There is time and space taken to manipulate the mksysb image file ready for the write (25 minutes maybe) but the write to real media is slow.

If your mksysb image file is about 2Gb (must fit a single DVD I think) then you will need 5Gb free in rootvg so it can build /mkcd/cd_fs and /mkcd/cd_images at an appropriate size (determined for you in the mkdvd script)


Before you create your mksysb image, make sure you save an structural image of any volume groups you want to rebuild too like this:-

Code:

rm -r /tmp/vgdata                          # Clear out any old definitions
mkszfile                                   # Create rootvg requirements
for vg in `lsvg|sort|grep -v rootvg`
do
   echo "^\\\./" > /etc/exclude.$vg        # Exclude all files, i.e. take just the structure
   savevg -ef /disaster/$vg.structure $vg
done

# Now run mksysb as you normally would to a file
# Then run mkdvd to write to media

If the directory /disaster is in the rootvg then these will be available on the recovery. You can use:-

Code:

restvg -qf /disaster/vg-name.structure hdisk2 hdisk3 hdisk4....

This will build your replacement volume groups to match the sizes you had at the time. It will restore (and mount) filesystems and raw logical volumes and then you can recover your business data from whatever other backup solution you have.

It is less error prone and far quicker that having a scripted mkvg-mklv-crfs. On a recovery where we stopped issuing all the makes & creates and used restvg instead, we saved 4 hours just on the step to recreate the disk layout.



Robin