Monday, August 29, 2011

HMC Commands for Documenting LPAR Configuration

For power systems p servers that are HMC managed, there are some tools you can use to document your LPAR profile configurations that in conjunction with other traditional data such as AIX snap files or prtconf output can be useful should a server need to be manually rebuilt. The tools that can make the tasks of documenting the LPARs' configuration include system plan and some queries of the profile data. Queries can be run from the HMC command line and the text output does provide a compact way of describing profile definitions which can also be used to recreate profiles from scripts if desired. The system plan output file can be used to restore profiles automatically should the need ever arise.
Following are some simple queries you can run to document the LPAR configurations.

If you are running HMC v7r3.4 or higher then the following command should allow you to create a system plan that details the profile definitions.

mksysplan -f -m --novios

The plan can be exported using the HMC GUI and used in case you have to manually rebuild your profiles or the plan might be used to automatically recreate the profiles should restoring profile data from other backup methods fail.

Another command you can use to gather your profile data in case there are issues with system plan follows.

lssyscfg -r prof -m

Some additional queries you can do if you have VIO servers that are active include following.

lshwres -m -r virtualio --rsubtype scsi

To get the name of your server to use in the above commands you can run

lssyscfg -r sys -F name

The data you get back from querying the profile data with the lssyscfg command and querying the virtual scsi data from lshwres can be saved along with any other server configuration data you might and would provide good documentation of your LPAR configurations should you ever need to manually rebuild a server the servers.

For more information regarding system plan or other HMC commands you can used the related topics links posted at the end of this tech-note.