RE: HMC

I agree with the positive comments.  WebSM makes life a lot easier from
a maintenance perspective.  One HMC can not only serve as the console
for multiple LPARs but for multiple iSeries machines as well.  We have
an HMC + an iSeries in each of 2 data centers.  Each HMC is set up to
control both iSeries so we have redundant consoles.

As a console manager it lets you share a console session between
multiple people.  If connecting remotely you can also disconnect &
reconnect at will without losing the console itself.  Great for
monitoring a RCLSTG or GO SAVE/21 without worrying about losing the
connection.

And what Justin said about iSeries Access is true, but basically any
emulator can be configured to connect to the HMC and get you a console.
I can use the PalmOS 5250 emulator from Mochasoft on my Treo and get a
system console on my phone.

Where the HMC has room for improvement:
- I reboot them infrequently (like more than 6 months between reboots).
As such it will sometimes complain about it having been a long time
since a disk check was run so it proceeds to run it right then.  That
adds 10 or so minutes to the HMC reboot, which is annoying.  There is a
decent enough progress display (Linux text screen startup stuff).
- It really ought to ship with mirrored hard drives.  If not by default
at least as an option.  Really, the motherboard probably already
supports SATA RAID (it is an xSeries server chassis after all); adding a
second 80GB HD would add about $60 to the price.
- The Java code just plain never runs very fast.  It works but there's
no snap to the UI except for the emulator.
- Limited scripting capabilities.
- No LDAP/Active Directory integration for a user store.  Not a big
thing in and of itself but it does mean that you have to manage the IDs
locally and the supplied policy capabilities are primitive.
- It's not (yet) a full replacement for the i5/OS
phone-home-for-problems function.

Of those the only one that truly matters to me is the scripting.