HMC General Q&A

What is Hardware Management Console (HMC)?

The HMC is a server or stand alone machine that provides a graphical user interface tool to manage several Power Systems. The HMC manages system through hypervisor and operating system. From version 7 it is truly web based and you can configure, installs and manage, partitioned, virtualization most of your Power5 and 6 boxes via HMC. There are many tasks you can do with HMC, such as,

·                  Powering off and on of the partition

·                  Configure and activate resources to the system

·                  Creates and stores LPAR profiles and allocated resources to them.

·                  HMC do the dynamic memory reconfiguration of the partition.

·                  Setup VIO server and VIO client thru HMC and do micro-partition, create storage

·                  pool and processor pool with it

·                  Provide virtual console to the partition

Most of the time we installed dual HMC for redundancy and make sure to achieve more uptime in a wide system

Why do I need a Hardware Management Console, anyway?

You need a HMC if you plan to:

– Configure and manage logical partitions and partition profiles (selected models can configure LINUX partitions without a HMC).
– Perform DLPAR (dynamic LPAR) functions.
– Activate and manage Capacity on Demand resources.

You can also use the HMC to:
– Perform service functions
– Manage frames (towers), IOPs and IOAs. * Note that you cannot see below the IOA to the device level.
– Manage system profiles (yes, you can have more than one!)
– Power on and power down. The Service Processor is always hot if there is power to the server.
– Activate and manage Virtualization Engine technologies.
– 5250 emulation so you can get a console up on a i5/OS partition or a virtual terminal window for AIX or LINUX.