HMC & CMC

With the introduction of POWER9 midrange E950 system comes an update to the HMC. HMC V9 R1.920 has many enhancements along with the ability to manage the POWER9 E950 servers. Let’s take a quick look at the enhancements in HMC V9 R9.1.920.

To get things started, V9 R1 M920 is a service pack for the V9 R1 release which means, you would update (Not Upgrade or fresh install) to 920 from V9 R1 M910 or V9 R1 M911. Please note that you would have to update to M920 to get service fixes for V9 R1 going forward.

PowerVM:

• Live Partition Mobility (LPM): Enhancement to support LPM Data Encryption and compression. Starting with server firmware FW920, HMC V9 R M920.0 and/or Novalink 1.0.0.10, the partition data sent between the servers will automatically be encrypted for better security and compressed for better performance. You can find more details on this feature here
• Simplified Remote Restart (SRR): Ability to list possible & suggested target side Virtual IO mappings for remote restart operations.
• Support for installing VIOS using USB.

Enhanced UI Improvements:

• You will now have an option to specify client adapter while attaching storage to a partition through vSCSI, when creating a partition with template or attaching storage thereafter.
• Support for Regular Expression based search in dashboard views.
• Virtual Networks menu option has been added to the Virtual IO Server providing the ability to add a client virtual ethernet adapter to a Virtual IO Server.
• You can now remove any stale trunk adapters from the Adapter View of Virtual Networks Menu at the System level.
• Support for Sync Virtual Switch Mode.
• Capture Partition & System Templates will now have detailed progress messages indicating any errors or failures.
• Partition Virtual Storage will now have an option to add a new path to an already attached storage.  
• Partition Virtual Storage will now have an option to run “cfgdev” in the Virtual IO Server while attaching storage to a partition.
• Segregated views/options to work with Physical Volumes, Logical Volumes, Shared Storage Pool Volumes within the Virtual SCSI view of Parition Virtual Storage
• You can now choose the “Last Activated Profile” as a column in the Partition tabular view.
• Support for overrides like boot mode while activating a partition with current configuration.
• Support for Export Topology Diagram with large data
• Support for fetching PoolSize as a quick property when working with Shared Processor Pool via Rest API (RFE 115114)

HMC Management & Security Enhancements:

• ILMT / BigFix agent support is added to the vHMC, so that customers can certify that  they have the correct number of licenses during audit. Specifically, the BigFix agent will be available in vHMC images, and not the hardware appliance images.
• Enhanced Certificate Management to support configurable certificate age limit

The following features were added based on customer requests for enhancements.

• You can now create a network bond between the interfaces of the HMC to have the ethernet failover capability (RFE 83456)
• Data Replication is supported via CLI through the chdatarep and lsdatarep commands (RFE 91187)
• DNS setting can be enabled or disabled from the CLI through the chhmc command. (RFE 107924)
• Support for configuring multiple base DN’s in the LDAP configuration (RFE 107272)
• Ability to disable password based authentication for users created locally on the HMC (RFE 82954)

Important Notes:

• HMC V9 can manage POWER7, POWER8 & POWER9 systems but cannot be used to manage POWER6 systems.  
• The following browser versions are now supported
  1. Google Chrome Version 66.0.3359.181
  2. Safari Version 11.1
  3. Internet Explorer 11.0.9600
  4. Mozilla Firefox Version Mozilla Firefox Version 52 Extended Support Release (ESR) and Mozilla Firefox Version 60 Extended Support Release (ESR)
• On POWER9 servers, the HMC Virtual Appliance for PowerVM must run in POWER8 compatibility mode, for this release.
• Please note that HMC V9 R1 is the last supported release for 7042 appliance models (x86 Hardware Appliance)
• x86 based vHMC can now manage IBM OpenPOWER systems. You can find details on HMC support for IBM OpenPOWER systems here

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