Latest on trying to set up my POWER server
Well, starting and failing…
So after a lot of Internet searches, and reading lots of IBM documentation, it’s pretty much impossible for me to get a proper IBM i license for my existing server, without paying a lot of money for a subscription; IBM eliminated the permanent license model for IBM i and replaced it with a subscription model.
Given that and that I already have this POWER server here, I decided to do a little rearranging of my home network. My main Linux server is an Intel i7-6700K machine that I built in 2015. It served as my gaming machine for ages, but then I turned it into a server by buying a 4U rackmount case and two 5-bay SAS enclosures for the case.
I’m retiring this server, and replacing it with this POWER 720 server, running Linux. I also acquired a HP StorageWorks P2000 SAS enclosure. This should let me move my existing ZFS disks over to the POWER server.
On top of that, I bought a used POWER 720 from Midland with a permanent IBM i 7.3 license.
Back to installing Linux on the first POWER 720 – this has been a lot of trial and error. I gave up on trying to use HMC, since I don’t have a desire to use Logical Partitions (I’m not going to use PowerVM, after all).
When I got the system to boot off an openSUSE Leap 15.6 DVD-ROM, I was presented with an out of memory error.
So, this seems to be an issue with the Virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM, as some of you know from your x86 hardware). IBM suggests disabling the vTPM but unfortunately mine seems to already be disabled in ASMI.
Moving on from openSUSE Leap 15.6, I looked at FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE. That’s a no-go too, it’s also ppc64le (POWER8 and newer), same with Debian 13, Ubuntu, and Fedora Server.
This leaves with me two further possibilities: Gentoo Linux, and AIX.
AIX is a natural fit for the hardware, since it comes from IBM, but I’m not sure as to porting open source software over to it. I’m going to explore AIX for a bit, look for that in my next post.