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  • 1.  export sysplan and deploy it from P8 to P10 possible !!

    Posted 2 days ago

    Hello team,

    My concern is to migrate P8 to P10, with LPM it will be easy, but managment decide to it with downtime for some reason. Now need to create all lpars on P10, manually possible but 200 lpars is too much. Using ansible will be better, but not yet deployed. HMC command line is heavy, need to be very carreful to set adapter one by one, with ID, slot, ...etc.

    The syspan export and import and deploy maybe good solution, but I did not find out full procedure how to proceed.

    Waiting your insights on this topic, thanks in advance.

    regards,

    Houas



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    Houas MENASRIA
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  • 2.  RE: export sysplan and deploy it from P8 to P10 possible !!

    Posted 2 days ago

    Hello Houas,

    I don't think I fully understand your question. You write "management decided to do it with downtime, for some reason". That doesn't imply that Live Partition Mobility cannot be used as far as I understand it. LPM is capable of migrating partitions from POWER8 to Power10 if the partitions are shutdown (inactive), given the normal prequisites are honored (like the target system being able to see the LUNs, the same networks etc). If you can do LPM between that P8 and the P10 while the partitions are active, you should also be able to so so, when the partitions are inactive (shutdown).

    You should be able to use a System Plan. If you never used that, some current documentation can be found at System plans on the HMC - IBM Documentation. Carefully read the instructions, in particular the prerequisites needed on the target (P10) system for the system plan deployment to work. All in all, I think LPM would be way easier, much less work involved and much lower risk of having prolonged downtime.



    ------------------------------
    Richard Westerik
    Principal specialist
    Simac IT NL bv
    Ede
    +31651575123
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: export sysplan and deploy it from P8 to P10 possible !!

    Posted 2 days ago

    Hi Houas

    LPM works well only if the underlying infrastructure is setup correctly, tested, and validated.

    One way to make sure LPM will work is to ensure the P10 network and HBAs are setup correctly. RMC will need to work and HBAs will need to be zoned accordingly. Regardless of what hardware architecture you're migrating to and what method of migration you use, LPM or otherwise, it is a major architecture project. When you have all the necessary infrastructure setup, configured and tested, assuming you're using LPM, you want to run a Validate and Migrate on the P8 LPAR to a P10 frame as your target. If the validation status comes back green (no errors reported), 99% of time the LPAR is ready for LPM. I said 99% because it's not 100% until the LPAR is completely migrated to the new frame. 

    I had my share of LPM headache when the migration failed in-flightand luckily it was a non-prod. 

    I've migrated IBM P5 up to P10 and have never use LPM for migration. While the LPM validation feature checks the overall health of your environment and gives a green light when all checks out, it's not entirely error-proof. I still use it once awhile to test the environment to make sure all is good in case we need to move LPARs ad-hoc or in emergency.

    I recently migrated P9 to P10 and below is the very high-level work (no LPM).

    a. Get the P10 setup, configured, tested, and validated

    b. Work with Network team to get all network-related stuff ironed out.

    c. Work with SAN team to get all zoning and lun stuff ironed out.

    c. Validate and test each port on each VIOS on each P10 frame.

    d. Migration time (1hour +-)

    • shutdown LPAR on P9
    • activate LPAR on P10
    • have teams start apps

    The migration time can be less than an hour or a bit more depending on system. System reboot takes about 5 minutes and another 5-10 minutes to check the system after it comes up.

    This method of migration work for us but it requires downtime and luckily the hour(s) of downtime is tolerated by the business.

    I used sysplan for reference only but nothing else beyond that. 

    Good luck!



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    Angel Bugarin
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    Original Message


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