Originally posted by: xserpint

So I've been investigating my environment and have noticed that another admin built ~20 lpars without any paging space in rootvg, and without a paging space called hd6 - the boot scripts were not modified either. I've been looking for information on why this isn't a good idea and whether or not this is a supported configuration by AIX support and so far haven't found anything useful.

Has anyone run into this before? What issues did you encounter during updates, migrations, booting, any performance impact?

Does anyone have any official documentation from IBM going either way (required paging in rootvg, not required)?

This was done on AIX 6.1 if it matters.

Thanks

Originally posted by: flodstrom

In theory you don't have to have paging space in the rootvg, but I think the official recommodation is to not remove the default hd6  in the rootvg. Instead of removing hd6 make it as small as allowed (there's a minimum size) and define the external page space to required size. If I recall correctly you may run into various boot problems like slow booting in case there's no paging space in rootvg. There may even be situations where the system fail to boot if there's no page space available (if yo have page space on a SAN that might not be available during boot).

The hd6 page space in the rootvg is apparently also hardcoded in some places which may also cause problems. One potential problem is if you are using mksysb for OS backups, if I recall correctly mksysb expects hd6 to be available.

Originally posted by: GarlandJoseph

Maybe the intention is to use paging space served up by vios servers.  There is  a simple solution here...go talk to the other administrator.  I have seen a number of environments where there are a lot of system administrators but no standard set of procedures and processes.  They way to overcome this is to ask a question.