Re: Can VPM be used on system with HMC?

Here's the thing with tape and VPM.

You can ONLY share tape DRIVES to clients hosted by VPM not Libraries. In addition you cannot share drives that are assigned to a tape Library, only standalone drives may be shared.

There is no way to share a library or is there a way to assign a piece of hardware such as a SAS or Fiber adaptenator to an IBM i Guest.

So your fiber setup as nice as it is and I concur that it's the way I would want to do it if I didn't have VIOS at hand. Sadly it's not an option available to VPM users.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

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

On 4/24/2018 7:52 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:

I agree, why would anyone want to use VPM if they have an HMC?

However, I wonder why one would even need to dynamically move the tape
library around. We have ONE fiber channel port coming out of our Power 8.
It is controlled by a VIOS lpar. It goes to a SAN switch. From there it
goes to our tape library. Our tape library has multiple drives. All the
lpars of IBM i can do a WRKMLBSTS and see the library, and it's drives:
Device/
Resource Status Allocation
KDVLVTL VARIED ON
TAP13 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP16 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP20 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP22 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP23 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP31 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP32 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP33 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED

Each lpar can run backups at the same time as other lpars as long as you
do not exceed the number of drives.
We have so many drives we tell BRMS to back up using four drives at a
time. So we do stagger our backup times a little.

But if you just HAVE to dynamically lpar (like perhaps you have an
insistence on SCSI connection for some strange reason) then there are ways
to execute commands on the HMC from programs on IBM i to get it to do so
automatically. Al Barsa used to peddle a product to do this


Rob Berendt