Experiences with the POWER 550

Hi all,

The past few days i've installed, setup and migrated two old POWER5
(9405) 520 to a new 8204-E8A, aka POWER 550 with 2 LPARs.

It's the first time that i've handled a machine this big, and it was
quite a bit of work, but i didn't run into any issues that weren't my
fault.

Here's a list of notes i made throughout the installation process,
hoping they might help someone else.

* The IBM supplied cabling guide for the SCSI controllers is wrong and
unnecessary when using LPAR - unless the system was ordered with
correct placement
* The IBM supplied placement of cards is wrong - unless the system was
ordered with the correct placement
* The primary port for the EXP24 RAID Controller is port 2
* In the EXP24 Dual-SCSI Repeater card, the leftmost port should go to
the SCSI-Controller, and the rightmost port should go to the
single-port card
* Manufacturing Default Configuration doesn't work for a test IPL
without LPAR configuration - mostly because there are no disks in the
CEC and the EXP24 RAID Controllers were in the PCI expansion units
* Installing this system into a a short width rack is a bad idea, as
the HSL cable are extremely long and need a place to go, looping them
on the ground works though
* Clearing the RAID config after an IPL from CD requires an additional IPL
* It's not possible the remove the hotspare drives after IPLing from
CD without installing the LIC - so you will only see 11 disks (or 10,
depending on the number of spares). After installing the LIC,
everything will work as designed
* Rebuilding an array over the 11 disks in a EXP24 still takes a long time
* With 32GB of RAM, the FSP will use almost 2GB of RAM. Make sure that
the sales explains that to the customer, otherwise you'll have to
answer to him on why the two LPARs only have 15GB memory each.
* Restoring from a SAVE 21 on a V5R4 system with LIC V5R4M0 and then
loading the V5R4M5 LIC from CD and reloading the rest from tape works
perfectly

Regards,

Lukas