RE: LPAR Question -- MIDRANGE-L

Mark,

I'm one of those who recommend expert business partners for LPAR.  I used to
configure and install LPAR boxes for a business partner so I'll give it a
stab.  The heavy lifting in an LPAR configuration is not in running it but
ordering the correct hardware.  If you're technically competent, familiar
with work management, and study the documentation; then I don't doubt that
you'll do well.  But if you've never used IBM's configuration tools and
aren't familiar with the hardware requirements for an LPAR box, then you're
better off getting an expert opinion.

On most standard single-partition boxes, you just say how many drives of
what capacity, how many NIC's, and so on.  Things can fall together fairly
well and most business partners can configure the machine appropriately.
When you get into partitions, you as a customer need to know the hardware
requirements for each partition and the person that does the configuration
needs to be able to translate that into hardware.  Generally the entire
system is planned with the location of each card mapped out, which partition
each card is assigned to, and which cards are shared between partitions.

It gets rather complicated.  I've met people who ordered their own box with
the intent of implementing LPAR (they didn't tell the BP), but when push
came to shove, they didn't have a CD-ROM drive in the appropriate partition
to load the OS.  So unless you want to do a lot of homework for something
you're only going to do once, you're probably better off ordering from
someone with experience or using a consultant to verify your configuration.

Also, when you order a machine with the intent of LPAR, the factory will
install all of the hardware, but the cards and drives will need to be
rearranged to their proper locations, then you do a scratch install in each
partition.  Depending on how you fell about shoving around hardware and
loading operating systems, you may want experienced help for this also.

I'm sure that you'll be able to figure out how to run the thing Mark, the
documentation is pretty good - it's in the ordering and the installation
where additional help can be required.

Kind Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> On Behalf Of Mark Phippard
> Subject: LPAR Question
> 
> I have an LPAR question for you BP's and experts on the list.  I have seen
> messages about how you should work with an experienced BP to do your
> configs etc...  My question is that only necessary in a "real world"
> situation or is it always necessary because LPAR is so complicated?  I can
> see where if I had 2 or 3 locations running on LPAR and they all needed
> backups etc. that there would be hardware issues to consider, but that is
> not our situation.
> 
> We want to replace a pure QA box with something like a Model 800 or 810,
> but we would like to LPAR that box so that we can do stuff like load beta
> releases of OS/400 on the second partition and also just so that we can do
> more testing of our products in an LPAR environment.  This box doesn't
> really "matter".  We would not be doing much for backups or other things,
> we just want to be able to do the LPAR.  Is this something where we can
> just do it ourselves or do we really need to plan for it?
> 
> We do our boxes on lease through PartnerWorld, but we can contract with a
> local BP on services if it is necessary.
> 
> Thanks