Re: Power7/HMC: How to automatically start/stop VIOS with the hardware

Hello Roberto,

Am 26.03.2024 um 15:57 schrieb Roberto José Etcheverry Romero <yggdrasil.raiker@xxxxxxxxx>:

I would counter with, "Why would you shutdown the hypervisor before the VMs?"

The ESXi does the shutdowns for me, saving me thinking effort and manual labor of logging into each VM and manually shut it down. Once central point to be touched. Why should the admin employ manual labor when the computer itself can do this? Apparently some vendors care and implement this, others do not. :-)

In the PowerVM world you have the hardware hypervisor, which is the machine itself and the HMC says "are you sure you want to shutdown this?

Yes, I'm aware. And I would expect it to offer to orderly shut down the LPARs on my behalf at this point, including the logical conclusion that VIOS has to be the last partition to be shut down. This is called being user friendly. Or admin friendly, in this case.

Does your DB Server warn you about shutting down the APP server or closing all connections before shutting it down? No, that is for whoever owns the machine to decide.

No it does not. I think your comparison is flawed. If you shut down the database server, there is no data corruption happening. If you switch off a hypervisor with running VMs/LPARs, that's a completely different impact.

Going back to ESXi, the storage won't complain if I tell it to shutdown while the entire VMware environment is using it...

I was talking about VIOS which is AFAIK doing duty for the local host only. ESXi has "VIOS" integrated. No difference in regard to external or internal storage.

If you utilize "external" storage (FC, iSCSI, NFS, whatever) you are completely right and there is no difference between platforms. You have to think yourself then. But again, that wasn't my point.

And that is why the whole automation ecosystem exists. You set your own rules and use the provided tools to implement it, it is pretty easy after all.

With LPARS on Midrange, I'm apparently forced to bolt together something other vendors have included in the base software for a very long time. That is the basic message. Maybe someone @IBM reads this and starts to consider. ;-)

:wq! PoC