Re: IBM i hosting IBM i does not insulate you from hardware dependencies, right?

There are a couple cases where it helps, but generally if a particular release is not supported on the processor in your machine, you are out of luck.

Got a POWER8? You're not going to run i 6.1 on that, even if IBM i hosted, or VIOS for that matter either.

One exception were POWER6 machines that had HSL attached I/O drawers. Those machine would not run i 7.2 any longer as 7.2 did not support HSL. But if you had an i 7.1 hosting partition then you could run 7.2 as a guest even though the guest was using the HSL I/O. But only virtualized parts. If you tried to assign a tape controller from an HSL drawer to that 7.2 partition, you were out of luck. So not a processor exception in this case, only I/O.

I believe it is also legal to run i 7.1 as a guest on POWER9 on some configurations.

But no matter what if the processor in your server is not supported by the O/S you're trying to load, you will get a nice error 'unable to find code to support this system.' Or words close to that. Don't ask me how I know this. :-)

- DrF

On 4/3/2023 2:49 PM, Rob Berendt wrote:

Sounds like a simple FAQ type of question but my google-fu is off today.
I was asked elsewhere if one could run a version of IBM i on a current
Power server and then use that to host a partition of IBM i with an older
version of IBM i than is normally supported on that model of Power server.
I'm pretty sure the answer is no but I thought I'd double check.