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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

    I believe you can migrate an inactive lpar, just like you would with a running one.

    Does it help?



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    Marc Rauzier
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    Original Message


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

    Posted 2 days ago
    Edited by Phill Rowbottom 2 days ago

    You can do inactive migrations with LPM.  It can even be faster than active and can work in situations where active won't eg: no RMC connection, large LPAR and low network bandwidth between frames (not such an issue these days).

    Phill.



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    Phill Rowbottom
    Unix Consultant
    Service Express
    Bedford
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    Original Message


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

    Posted 2 days ago

    Another plus for inactive LPM - you can switch the LPAR from P8->P9/10 mode (as supported by the OS) as part of the migration and take greater advantage of your new hardware straight away.



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    Phill Rowbottom
    Unix Consultant
    Service Express
    Bedford
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    Original Message


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

    Posted 2 days ago

    If Mgt is taking downtime to migrate from P8 to P10 , then that is still fine for LPM. ( I know it defeats the purpose of the L in the LPM , but that's ok ).
    Bigger concern is what are your OS levels?  If they are able to running in P10 mode natively , then this is even better as this setting can be changed while the VM is down and moved to the frame like Phil is saying up above. 
    Sure , you can do an export / import of sysplan that will create your environment on the new machine but it looks like LPM may be the better tool for this particular job.  BTW  - if you have never created a sysplan before , it is a simple and easy way to document the current hardware / VMs on the system.  I think that started in the Power7 era.




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    Alan Fulton
    Follow me on Twitter - @The_Iron_Monger
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    Original Message


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

    Posted 2 days ago

    Houas,

    Hey, there. Hope all is well, all things considered. 

    I concur with everyone else: offline LPM may be an option. There is some preparedness that's required in order to use LPM to migrate between systems, so I would recommend reviewing this setup guide and the preparation checklist if you're considering using the offline LPM method:

    IBM Redbooks - Live Partition Mobility Setup Checklist:
    https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips1184.html

    IBM Redbooks - Live Partition Mobility Preparation Checklist:
    https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips1185.html

    Additionally, if you're going to be using LPM, make sure that your secondary/auxiliary/backup WWPNs from any virtual fibre channel adapters are also zoned to your disk arrays. I don't think this is quite as important with an offline LPM, but if you decide to do some online LPM operations for some reason, those will be used as part of the move.

    If you're thinking about using a System Plan, that shouldn't be an issue. It's just a matter of capturing a system plan of the source system, then, assuming there are different HMCs managing the POWER8 and POWER10, saving the source system plan to your local machine via an Export operation, importing the source system plan to the new HMC, and then deploying the source system plan onto the target system. I've not done this myself before, but it should be relatively straightforward. You can review the page at IBM Documentation for instructions on how to capture, export, import, and deploy a system plan.

    IBM Documentation - System Plans on the HMC:
    https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power10?topic=plans-system-hmc

    Best wishes on your migration!



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    Steven Garcia
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    Original Message


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

    Posted yesterday

    Hello Everyone,

    Thank you all for your valuable responses-they've been extremely helpful and should definitely be considered before initiating LPM on newer frames.

    I recently had the opportunity to perform Live Partition Mobility (LPM) from Power8 to Power10 systems. In our case, we were dealing with large Oracle databases and a significant number of disks, along with Dell EMC storage configured with PowerPath. We opted for the DB/APP downtime approach: stopping the database and application services while keeping the OS running, and then migrating the server using HMC from Power8 to Power10. The migration was smooth, and the server transitioned to the new frame within 10 minutes.

    However, we encountered an issue during reboot on some servers with a large number of disks. The system took longer to boot and displayed reference code 0999. This delay was caused by EMC PowerPath, which requires more time to scan disks. If your server has more than 25 disks, I recommend shutting it down and booting with a single path to reduce boot time. Once the server reboots on the new hardware, subsequent reboots proceed normally.

    Additionally, IBM's Live Partition Mobility tool offers the capability to migrate all partitions to a newer frame simultaneously. Although I haven't personally used this feature, it's worth exploring.

    Hope this information proves helpful!



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    Dinesh Bahadur
    System Administrator
    UNIX (LINUX/AIX)
    email: bahadurdinesh@gmail.com
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinesh-bahadur-ba81002/

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    Original Message


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