Live Partition Mobility Checklist

This post is a list of generic points I am checking when I setup Live Partition Mobility.

Official IBM checklists

IBM provides two official check list for LPM:

Fix Level Recommendation Tool LPM

The first step is to validate if your systems and operating systems doesn’t have a known issue which could impact the LPM operation. FLRT allows you to check your environment and provides recommendations on updates or upgrades needed for LPM.

Here an example :

You have also other recommendations related to LPM:

Note: validations are done only for LPM operation support.

You can have additional recommendations when checking if the system and operating systems are up to date in the FLRT system check.

RMC network communication

Dynamic partitioning needs to work properly.

RMC communication is needed between th HMC and: * source system VIO servers * destination system VIO servers * lpar to move

Easy check

if you can perform DLPAR operations on vios and lpar, RMC is working well.

You can also run “lspartition -dlpar” on your HMC to check the RMC status:

lspartition -dlpar
<#0> Partition:<6*8233-E8B*100EB9P, baslibre172, 10.10.10.172>
       Active:<1>, OS:<AIX, 7.2, 7200-00-00-0000>, DCaps:<0x2c5f>, CmdCaps:<0x1b, 0x1b>, PinnedMem:<768>
<#1> Partition:<1*8286-42A*213BEBV, S824A-vios1, 10.10.10.140>
       Active:<1>, OS:<AIX, 6.1, 6100-04-11-1140>, DCaps:<0x14f9f>, CmdCaps:<0x1b, 0x1b>, PinnedMem:<1128>
<#11> Partition:<1*8202-E4B*103286P, oldnim, 10.10.10.132>
       Active:<0>, OS:<, , >, DCaps:<0x0>, CmdCaps:<0x0, 0x0>, PinnedMem:<0>
<#12> Partition:<5*8286-42A*213BEBV, baslibre211, 10.10.10.211>
       Active:<0>, OS:<Linux/SuSE, 3.0.101-63-ppc64, 11>, DCaps:<0x0>, CmdCaps:<0x0, 0x19>, PinnedMem:<0>
<#15> Partition:<6*8233-E8B*06269FP, rhel72-admin, 10.10.10.142>
       Active:<1>, OS:<Linux/Red Hat, 3.10.0-327.el7.ppc64, 7.2>, DCaps:<0x2c7f>, CmdCaps:<0x19, 0x19>, PinnedMem:<0>

If RMC is working properly, you should see the operating system version and partition ip address.

DCaps field must not be equal to 0.

Mover Service Partition

To move a active partition, you need to define at least one vio server as Mover Service Partition on each physical frame. This vio server doesn’t need to be the one virtualizing the I/O of the partition.

Recommendation: When you have multiple vio servers, it’s a good design decision to choose the less critical or used vio server(s) to be the Mover Service Partition.