There seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether or not a fiber attached
tape drive can be "an alternate IPL" device as well as "an alternate
installation" device. There is a difference. An alternate IPL device can
be used to start the system. Some alternate installation devices cannot
be used as alternate IPL devices.
But I know that my fiber attached, via SAN, media library device, which
doesn't even have the option to be configured sequential but has to be
configured as random, can be used as an alternate IPL device. It's really
important that you follow these steps here:
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v7r1m0/topic/rzarm/rzarmprp.htm
In fact, you might want to step though steps 10-17 now instead of waiting
for a high pressure situation. Especially those of you who focus more on
development and rarely touch admin. Terms like "IOP" and how to determine
which slot this is might be something you get set up before you're under
the gun.
Did I also mention that my media library has six tape drives in it and is
used by five lpars, one of which is Linux?
I think IBM has their ducks pretty much in a row now that if the devices
isn't hooked up via TCP/IP it can be used as an alternate installation
device. The TCP/IP interface that gives me a web interface into the tape
drive doesn't count as a detractor. That's not how the data is exchanged.
Now, if you have one of these third party devices that does data
deduplication and remotely echos your data to an offsite device I'd really
question as to whether or not one of these can be used as an alternate IPL
device.
Not being able to use it as an alternate IPL device is not the end of the
world. Keep a LIC CD around for just such an emergency. But, frankly,
with my multiple lpars it's easier to use the tape library. Done right, I
can stick in that CD and every lpar will have a message in QSYSOPR that
volume I_BASE has been mounted. Done wrong, and I have to hunt around and
figure out how to move it from one lpar to another and hope to Christ that
it's not "dedicated" to one lpar off of the same IOP that's running that
LPAR's load source disk drive. Which may be one reason why we tend to shy
away from using the disk slots in the CEC. I am sure that if I dinked
with this enough I could get this virtualized properly and not have this
issue.
Rob Berendt
midrange.com
