RE: LPARS - What is there to know about them

Rob,

As others have commented, there is quite a bit of work required on the
initial configuration, design, and installation of an LPAR system.  If
your shop is headed in that direction I would recommend working with a
Business Partner who understands the issues.  IBM has never configured
the hardware before shipping to generally the system needs to be taken
apart and put back together when it arrives.  Because of the nature of
the way the iSeries shares hardware resources, it is imperative that the
system be planned in advance by a professional.

That said, some LPAR systems are just logically separate machines which
communicate with each other via TCP/IP, have their own consoles, and from
an admin perspective, can be operated as though they were on entirely
separate hardware platforms.  If you want to get more complex, you can do
things like move processor power and memory from your test system to your
production system at night to get better batch throughput.

If you want to share a high-speed tape drive between partitions, then the
admin would need to understand how to move the resource from on partition
to the other.

Make sure that your primary partition is devoted exclusively to being a
primary partition and is not running applications.  This way, your
secondary partitions can be IPLed independently.  When you need to
perform an IPL on your primary, all other partitions will also shut down.

Your question about detail work for an admin really depends on the
business requirements of the shop.  Have they already installed their
system?  What functionality is required for inter-partition
communication?

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> On Behalf Of Rob Phillips
> Subject: LPARS - What is there to know about them
> 
> HI I am trying to see if I understand about LPARS. I understand the
> high level. That you can use resources of other machines, that you can
> create a very controlled environment.
> 
> Is there more - Is there alot of detail work for an admin in a shop
> that uses LPARS extensively.
> 
> Thanks,
> Rob