IMHO, VIO Servers are not to be treated as “AIX” servers…
Treat them as black-box infrastructure. Yes, they happen to be running AIX, but that’s not the customers concern.. They’re not paying more for having 4 of them than just 2 (that I’m aware of anyway)..
They need to look at the full functionality-picture, and make a technical decision to consolidate, if it still makes sense.
If ultimately you have to do it.. then for the most part it can be done dynamically. Network may be the biggest headache.
Do you have the capacity to do an LPM off the box, then back to it again?
when you specify the target of an LPM operation you can specify the target VIOs to use (as long as they’re defined as Mover Service Partitions)
For storage, if using external san storage, build new paths through the new VIOs, so the client just sees additional paths show up. Then remove the old path structure from the old VIOs.
If you’ve allocated internal storage (or LVs off of san storage on the VIO), then allocate similarly sized storage off the new VIOs, and migrate the storage on the client, (as you would with a SAN refresh).
For network..This may cause/require an outage.. (I’m not as savvy with networking, so hopefully someone can clarify these steps)
The more I think about this, there’s a lot that depends on how you have it configured.. Do the New/Old VIOs share VLANs, etc..
Are you using access ports?
Are you using ether-channel/LACP/802.3ad ??
Does the client see multiple VLANs? Does the client have multiple IP addresses across multiple subnets?
Is there any chance you’re using a virtual IP address (VIP)?
As I type, I realize I’m in over my head with networking (I don’t know what I don’t know, so can’t even ask all the right questions).… so I’m going to stop here…
Other than storage and networkging, the only other thing I can think of…
Do you use Shared memory? (where there are paging devices defined through the VIOs)..
IN short, you’ve just got to make sure the new VIOS have all the resources allocated.. either “migrate” to them (as with disk storage). or fail-over to them.
Tom
Original Message:
Sent: 3/31/2023 2:53:00 PM
From: Luis Hernan Otegui
Subject: VIOS consolidation
Hi, our customer is in the process of reducing their AIX footprint, and they have requested us to reduce/consolidate the number of VIOS virtualizing the connection of the LPARs in the physical frames. I have only done this via a hardware refresh/LPAR migration to a different physical frame.
I was wondering if somebody has experience moving LPARs from one vios pair to another one in the same physical frame.
The main roadblock I'm facing right now is the heterogenous environment: AIX and IBM i LPARs coexist in the same frame, although depending on different pairs of VIOS. Our customer would like to have just one pair of VIOS per frame, and decommision the rest.
Anyway, if anybody has some actual experience, or some pointers on where to look for information, I'd be more than thankful.
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Luis Hernan Otegui
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