Re: Attaching IASP to another system

I'm coming into this conversation a little late, but it is my understanding, as I work with IBM Lab Services to bring up my "new" HA/DR environment, that I can mirror my iASP from one V7000 SAN to another at a remote location (Global Mirroring) and keep that mirroring active all the time. When I want to do a BU of the iASP, I create a FLASHCOPY at the remote site and attach it to an LPAR designed to back up this "point in time" image my iASP.

I would think that if I had all the application licensing in place, I could run any applications on the iASP on the BU LPAR just fine. However, I wouldn't want to consider the complexity of trying to incorporate any iASP changes made here back to the source iASP on my production system!

You can also create several different FLASHCOPY's of the iASP (If you have enough SAN disk) and attach them to any number of "test" partitions. It is very flexible.

In fact, to deploy the base OS on my HA system and the DR system, I just built the *SYSBAS up the way I wanted on the HA system (all the *SYSBAS disk are located on the V7000 SAN), made a copy of it, mirrored it to the V7000 at the DR site and attached it to the DR Power8 partition there.... DONE! I have a functioning system at my DR site. I had to reenter licensing information for the OS and any third party software though because the system serial number changed.

V7000 SAN is the way to go !

Reply or Forwarded mail from: Kenneth E Graap

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Evan Harris
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 1:21 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: [External]Re: Attaching IASP to another system

Hi Larry

Ok, well I semi-expected that from what I could find on menus and the documentation but figured it was worth asking the question.

I think it would be handy if you could do this and the system was able to check the disks for some kind of "IASP-ish consistency check" before varying them on but oh well... :)


On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 10:12 AM, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree with your thinking but no, at least not with internal disk. As
Marc mentioned you can do it with external disk but the clustering
does need to be set up in advance. It's all about the O/S's knowledge
of the disks. If the O/S knows about them via the cluster then how
exactly they got there is not important. The SAN did it so that's good
enough. With internal disk you don't have that option.

You cannot simply 'introduce the O/S' to some disks and say: "Trust me
these here are an iASP" like Windows or Linux will simply 'see' a
bunch of disks and bring them on line.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.


On 11/5/2015 3:58 PM, Evan Harris wrote:

Hi Marc

Thanks for the response. We have done a few planned swaps with IASPs
in the same cluster, my question was more of a general one prompted
by thinking about storage. So what I am wondering is: if I know what
disks/LUNs form part of an IASP can I define that on a another system
that had no previous knowledge of it and just bring it online.

For example, I can do a conceptually similar thing by copying storage
spaces from an i-on-i guest LPAR to an other system and simply by
attaching them to some virtual scsi adapters I can get the whole
system to fire up.

Can I do a similar thing with an IASP ?

For clarity I am not trying to do this as part of a HA role swap or
as part of a cluster I am just kind of curious as to whether i can
(for example) run up copies of IASPs on another system on an ad hoc
basis by manipulating the associated storage.

Hope that explains further what I am wondering about.


On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 8:28 AM, Marc Rauzier <marc.rauzier@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Le 05/11/2015 20:15, Evan Harris a écrit :

Hi all

Hello

We have been doing some lab work on PowerHA and the technologies
around it

and have a question regarding IASP storage:.

Is it possible to attach an IASP to a new system and keep the
contents of the IASP intact, and if so h ow ?

If I had 3 LUNs defined in an IASP and copied that storage to 3
other LUNs is it possible to then attach that storage as an IASP to
a new system and bring the IASP up on the different system ?

The source and destination systems must be members of the same
cluster and must be defined in the device domain. You do have to
have one destination system per target system until 7.2. There are
improvments in 7.2 regarding this sentence but I did no tested them
yet.
While the target IASP is varied off, you can then use a flashcopy
from the source volumes to the target volumes and then, vary on the
IASP on the target system. PowerHA provide STRxxxSSN commands to
initiate the flashcopy. xxx is SVC for an SVC (and brothers like
V7000) external storage. xxx is ASP for DS8x00 external storage.
I am not aware of any possibility to do the same clone operation
with internal disks.

We do it every night on around 20 clusters to perform the backup to
tape operation on the target systems.

The PowerHA SystemMirror for i redbook as a chapter for this kind of
operations.

I realize there could be some application dependencies missing like
user

profiles, JOBDs or whatever, but from a pure data/storage
perspective is it possible to do what I am asking.

Yes. The administrative domain provided by PowerHA can help you to
synchronize user profiles, job descriptions, job queue definition
(not the content), and so ....
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