IBM has come out with a new release HMC V10 R2 M1030 for management of new firmware levels along with User Experience improvements and a set of new features enabling a seamless systems management experience.
To start with, HMC V10 R2 is a new release and hence is an upgrade from an existing level of HMC. You can upgrade to V10 R2 from V9 R2 M950 or V10 R1 M1010 with or without additional service packs.
HMC V10 will manage Power10, POWER9 and POWER8 systems only.
HMC User Experience Enhancements:
As part of our continued User Experience focus, HMC 10.2.1030.0 includes the next phase in the user interface (UI) transition to a new look based on Carbon design and we welcome your feedback on the UI enhancements.
New GUI changes include a new navigation, new views for resources like Systems, Partitions, Virtual IO Servers, etc new HMC settings panel with features like date & time, language, remote connectivity, default settings for timeouts consolidated into a single panel. Groups function is now called Tags in the new UI. Systems & Partition level actions have been grouped into different categories for easy and simplified access.
New Systems View with collapsed left menu:
New left expanded Menu:
For this release, you can switch between new and old dashboard if you would like to , using the switch option in the menu under User icon.
You can learn more on navigation options in the new dashboard compared with the old dashboard using the “Learn about the HMC interface” option in the login page of HMC.
Systems & Virtualization Management Enhancements:
- Enhancement to support Remote Code Load. For customers who are entitled for Remote Code Load (RCL), this enhancement provides the ability for IBM Support engineers to perform code update on Power Systems remotely. Remote connection can only be established when you start the remote support secure connection from HMC. You can use the HMC GUI or command line interface to start or stop the remote support secure connection, along with providing an access code which is required for the remote support team to connect remotely to HMC. Refer Remote Code Load for more details
- Ability to list SRIOV Physical Port Mac address is added with HMC 10.2.1030 (Requires FW1030).
VIOS Management Enhancements:
As a continuation of VIOS Management enhancement delivered in previous releases, HMC V10 R2 M1030 adds ability to Update VIOS using HMC with update images from a remote server, IBM website, USB or HMC. Ability to import VIOS images to HMC and managing the images are also provided to apply updates for multiple VIOS’s.
Before starting the update, you can take any backup’s as needed and also use the Validate & Prepare for VIOS maintenance features to check for redundant setup for Virtual Storage & Network.
Option to manage VIOS images and update VIOS is available via GUI, Rest API and Command Line Interface.
Live Partition Mobility (LPM) & Remote Restart (RR) Enhancements:
- Enhancement to support Live Partition Mobility for partitions with Persistent Memory volumes. Requires HMC 10.2.1030 and FW1030.
- Ability to label FC ports for use for Live Partition Mobility and Remote Restart operations. With this capability, you can assign labels to FC ports (using labelvios command) to group FC ports and provides greater/granular control for where the mappings should be done during LPM & RR operations. Eg:- labelvios -m sys1 -o s -l fcportprod -i “resource=fcport,port_name=fcs0,vios_names=vios1”
- Extending the capability to label vios for Virtual Storage for the purpose of LPM, RR operations, enhancement is done to support ability to label VIOS for SRIOV vNIC mappings which will be used by HMC during LPM, RR operations for choosing the appropriate VIOS mappings. You can use the labelvios command to set the VIOS level labels for SRIOV vNIC resource type.
- Enhancement has been done to maintain SRIOV Physical adapter level redundancy during LPM, RR operations, whenever its possible. With this addition, if SRIOV vNIC is created from 2 different physical adapters in the source system, HMC will maintain placement in 2 different physical adapters in target, whenever its possible.
- Support for user selection of target mappings for SRIOV Migratable Logical Ports for LPM, RR operations.
HMC Management and Security Enhancements:
- Secure boot support for Virtual HMC (vHMC) appliance running on ESXi and KVM Hypervisors is added. There are separate Virtual HMC Install/Recovery images available for secure-boot enabled and non-secure boot and you can choose the appropriate image based on the secure boot setting. You can refer to the readme bundled with the Virtual HMC appliance image for steps for installing vHMC with secure boot enabled.
- Ability to update HMC with Service Pack or PTF (Program Temporary Fix) on top of base release image using IBM website option has been added. With this option, you can list the available updates, import, and update directly from IBM website.
- Enhancement has been done to support PowerSC profiles for HMC. With this capability, you can enable PowerSC agent on HMC and allow incoming connectivity for port 11125 by modifying firewall settings in HMC and have your PowerSC server monitor and manage HMC as one of the end points for security compliance.
- Ability to use group level attributes on the LDAP server for auto-managed server for LDAP authentication has been added. With this ability, instead of setting up required attributes at each user level, you can create multiple groups for different user types and specify the required attributes like task role, resource role at a group level which simplifies management of users with LDAP authentication on HMC.
Note: Network upgrade to V10R2 requires a special ifix PTF MH01941/MH01942 or PTF MF70430/MF70431 before the upgrade is done.
CMC & Power Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity a.k.a Enterprise Pools 2.0 Updates:
Cloud Management Console (CMC) provides insights for your Power System infrastructure and is the platform for Power Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity a.k.a Enterprise Pools 2.0. New CMC update that was rolled out comes with new feature enhancement, scalability improvements and infrastructure improvements.
- Scalability Improvements: Support for 64 systems & 4K lpars in PEP2.0/CMC.
- Partition level tagging support for Redhat Openshift control plane nodes for RHEL CoreOS metering in EP2.0
- With this option, you can tag the VMs being used as Control plane nodes in a Redhat Openshift environment as “Control Plane Node” in EP2.0 app and such tagged VMs will be excluded from software (OS) metering for RHEL CoreOS resource type
- Control Plane Node tag is available only for RHEL CoreOS partitions
- Support for 2 new IBM cloud regions, Tokyo, Japan and Sao Paulo, Brazil where you can request CMC to be deployed.
- As part of Infrastructure updates that were done, there is a back-end migration of CMC from using IBM Cloud Foundry to IBM Code Engine. Please see announcement here for more details and update your environments before 31st March 2023 to continue connection from HMC to CMC.
PowerVM Novalink 2.1:
Novalink plays an integral part in the virtualization management of Power Systems and the new update 2.1 comes with enhancements, support for new OS levels to run Novalink on.
- Enhancement added to support Virtual Serial Number (VSN) for IBM i Partitions
- Live Partition Mobility support for partitions attached with persistent memory volumes (requires FW1030)
- Support for Ubuntu 20.04
- Support for RHEL 9
Contacting the PowerVM Team
Have questions for the PowerVM team or want to learn more? Follow our discussion group on LinkedIn IBM PowerVM or IBM Community Discussions