Hello AIX team members. I'm an IBM business partner and IBMi specialist. I have a customer that has a Power 7 box running AIX 7.1 they have 8 qty drives running raid 10 and have rootvg and two data volume groups. I'm not a AIX expert but they are looking for a new system and I am proposing a Power 10 box(9028-21B) The question I have here is how do I create the same volume groups with the Nvme drives and name spaces and how do I get the volume groups in protected raid set I know on the IBMi side a just mirror the name spaces together from each Nvme drive. I just want to make sure that I am creating the proper configuration and disk protection for the customer. Hope someone can educate me on this. We are going to AIX V7.3 in the proposal

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Larry Swartz
Power Systems Specialist
Ocean Computer Group
Matawan NJ
732-245-7367
Lswartz@oceancomputer.com
Larry
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Hi Larry,

you can use namespaces only on "Enterprise" NVMe. I don't remember the feature codes for them, but the cheapest NVMe drives you can use for AIX do NOT support namespaces. Use more expensive drives.

There is no "RAID manager" for NVMe drives like sissasraidmgr. Or I don't know such an option. In this case, you must recreate your RAID10 using LVM mirroring for each logical volume.

I think it could be a small nightmare if you must exchange one of the NVMe drives. You must then remove namespaces from all volume groups, recreate the namespaces on the new NVMe drive, and add them again to the volume groups.

Worse - you buy both NVMe drives at the same time, they are written in the same manner with the same intensity, they will most probably fail at the same time. But maybe it will be enough for the customer and I am just overthinking.

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Andrey Klyachkin

https://www.power-devops.com
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I'll add a caviet to my "what I'd do" (below), almost all of my AIX work is with SAN attached systems, very few with only internal disk.

I'd go for 6 NVMe drives, 1 pair for each VG eg: rootvg, datavg1 & datavg2. If more space is required in a VG, then add a second pair for that VG.  Rootvg (OS disk) doesn't require much space and could have the smallest drive, datavgs may need larger or multiple drives.

You can mirror in AIX like you can in IBMi.

Phill.

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Phill Rowbottom
Unix Consultant
Service Express
Bedford
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