Re: HMC Console necessary?

You might guess my thoughts are congruent with the good "Dr". The rack mounted IBM monitor/keyboard add as much as $3500 to the total price tag and one silly secret is many (not all) business partners "forget" to apply the same discount percentages to the HMC and the Monitor/Keyboard as they do with the rest of the system. Check your proposal carefully. Now it is true that the business partner does not get the same pricing on everything in the order but they often times play pricing games with individual items. The point here is, don't look at the individual items as much as the whole. It's the bottom line that goes on the lease or gets a check cut for it.

If you already have a Monitor/Keyboard (assuming the keyboard is not part the source of your troubles, we all know keyboards never go bad right?) keep it and use it on the next system and don't buy another one. You are also able to use any keyboard/Monitor/Mouse you would like with the HMC.

Keep in mind the HMC is an appliance and the price is not solely for the hardware, its the software that counts, and while there is a hardware component to the pricing, that portion is not the major part. Your life will be a lot more simple with an HMC than without it. Keep the HMC fixes and the FSP within reason of current and you will not have much in the way of trouble.

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 12/7/2010 8:43 PM, DrFranken wrote:

Well the obvious of course, you cannot do any changes to any partition.
You would need to change the system to OS managed for FSP Firmware and
designate one of the partition as a service partition BEFORE you do away
with the HMC. You will also need to convert the console to LAN console
(most likely anyway) or you won't have a console. You also will have NO
way of seeing SRC codes for a partition because when there is more than
one they don't show on the panel. Also if you ever PWRDWNSYS one of the
partitions the only way to get it back up is to PWRDWNSYS the other one
and the system itself and then restart the entire machine. This will
only work if you have both partition set to autostart. You could find
yourself unable to do a manual IPL and would NOT be able to ever restore
the system from tape should that be needed.

In short my opinion on removing the HMC is: Bad Idea.

Personally I would move in the new HMC and manage both systems with it.
You say it's 'Fragile' but don't say what that means. Is it old, is way
behind on fixes or versions? Has it been mistreated (i.e. overheated,
powered off abnormally multiple times, never backed up?) I have found
the HMC to be the best console ever. I also suspect the $10K Price is
for both an HMC AND a new flat panel with keyboard. The old one of those
normally works just fine with the new HMC and that will save you a bunch.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis.

On 12/7/2010 4:53 PM, Thomas Garvey wrote:

> Can anyone tell me what difficulty we would have if we did away with our HMC
> Console to operate our Model 520? It's become very fragile, limping along,
> and it seems we only need it to shut down (and start up) our two partition
> 520. We have never used it to reconfigure the two partitions.
>
> Is there some other way we would be able to manage the two partitions
> WITHOUT the HMC?
>
>
> Along the same lines, we are working with IBM to configure a new 8202-E4B
> and my prejudice against a new HMC is showing. I believe we need it to be
> able to configure and manage the micro-partitions we will be needing on the
> new box, but is there any other solution? Perhaps a remote software method
> to do what the HMC does? Maybe a Virtualization manager? The new HMC adds
> up to almost $10K for what (I believe) amounts to a glorified PC that runs a
> single application, the System Manager. We can't even use it for anything
> else. We don't have a single PC that costs that much. We know that the new
> HMC could be used to manage both the old and new systems, but maybe we could
> do away with both HMC's?
>
> Any thoughts, or am I just exposing my ignorance?
>
> Thomas Garvey
>