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Well as has been mentioned hardware wize this is expensive but in terms of max density in a rack you'll likely want to use EXP24 (SCSI Based) drawers set to split all four quarters so that you can get four LPARs per drawer. Of course each will need a RAID card and that should be able to be a 1 slot IOPless card 5776 (from memory). As Rob (I think) mentioned that will need to be V5R4M5 LIC to support it. Those cards will be in PCI-X drawers. (0588 is 14 slots for 4U) Recall also that this is RAID but no redundancy in the RAID cards etc.

With Power6 you can use the HEA card to get Ethernet to them and the HMC to get them a console. The Tape and DVD can be switchable so a single one CAN support all LPARS.

So in THEORY that 0588 supports 3 EXP24 drawers and thus 12 LPARs per 16U. This is NOT valid per IBM's rules (It thinks that's too many RAID cards for those buses but we know the I/O to only 6 drives won't kill it. Of course this slot space dies not counting the CEC and HMC.

So your SAN option will chew up more 0588s but without the 5787s (EXP24) you'll get more partitions in your rack that way. In terms of $$ per LPAR no idea whatever with hardware that old!! But then a 9117 is a P30 or P40 so O/S level it's not gonna be cheap.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 10/17/2016 11:15 PM, Benjamin Huntsman wrote:
Hi!
I have an odd, yet hopefully entertaining topic here, that maybe someone who remembers more about LPARs on V5R4 than I do could help with...

We have a small/medium project (don't ask... :) ), where one of the objectives is to cram as many V5R4 LPARs as we can get into as small of a rack unit count as possible. I need to take up less than a whole 48U rack, storage and HMC included.
Preferably, this will be on Power6, although that is not a hard constraint. I've been playing around with the Systems Planning Tool some, but I'm getting killed on the rules... According to it, each LPAR needs a CD-ROM, and potentially a tape drive. Obviously, I need to be able to load each LPAR, most likely from an Option 21 tape.
My current thought is to do a 9117-MMA with an 0588 chock-full of 2847's (IOP for SAN Load Source) and 5760's (FC Card), and doing so I could get 6 LPARs, with only one having tape drive access, plus one more in the CEC that uses the internal drives...

That's 8U for the 0588, 4U for the MMA, and 1U for the HMC. 13U so far.

For storage, the only option is a DS6800. Let's say we want some performance, but not tons, so we do a head and an expansion. That's 6 more U, plus a 1U box to manage the dang thing. Throw in a pair of 1U FC switches, and now we're at 22U.

Lastly, if we go for FC-attached tape libraries, that's probably another 4U. Grand total is 26U for 7 LPARs with questionable redundancy. Can we get any trickier than this, to somehow improve the density and/or redundancy? Get VIOS involved somehow, or something?

Any and all thoughts are appreciated!

-Ben


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