Setting up an environment for the POWER 720
The server the day I received it. I grabbed a cheap HDMI monitor and USB keyboard I had lying around, since this server came with a dual DVI graphics card, and two USB ports. Ultimately neither the monitor or keyboard are useful here, replaced by a ThinkPad later. In this view, there are no drives installed other than the DVD drive, and I’ve pulled one of the hot-swap trays to look at it. Eventually this machine will get racked in the 9U rack it’s sitting on, but I need to get the slide rails for it.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the IBM POWER servers are different than your average PC, or rackmount server. You mainly think of powering those up, watching the OS boot unattended, rebooting when necessary, etc.
Midrange and mainframe systems do not work this way.
I want to point out that I am, by no means, an expert on these systems, but I’m learning.
These servers have one or more dedicated Service Processors – think of it like an ILO (Integrated Lights Out) controller, or a computer-within-the-computer. This is what HMC uses to manage the machine. This machine turns on as soon as power is supplied – before you even power on the rest of the server.
If you’re running a fully managed IBM POWER server farm, you would also have a Hardware Management Controller (or, HMC). This comes in two forms – a rackmountable server (most seem to be 1U?) or a virtual machine. This basically runs a custom Linux installation, with a web-based UI that loads up in Firefox and lets you manage your servers.
Getting started for me, I read (what’s left) of the IBM documentation for my server, in particular, a POWER 720 Express 8202-E4C. I sort of jumped ahead to the “Working with operating systems” portion. That was a bit of a mistake in hindsight, but I’ll cover that shortly.
First off, I had to determine which version of IBM i that my machine can support. It’s a POWER7 CPU, so that limits it to IBM i 7.3 at the maximum. Following through the documentation page above, I hit my first stumble – the links into the IBM i 7.1 and 6.1 docs are broken. After a DDG search, I ended up at the correct installation documentation.
That documentation led me to discover the myriad ways you can manage this server – with a HMC being the most modern version. Other options are the Advanced System Management Interface (ASMI), which is available as a web server or via a ASCII console (serial), and the Operations Console, a 5250 console.
My intention was to use my older Lenovo ThinkPad T440p as my HMC server. It’s been sitting around for a while, after being retired for a newer ThinkPad. I found that the minimum supported version of HMC for my server is 7.x, but thought, hey I’ll start with 8.x. I downloaded the recovery disk from IBM, burned the DVD and attempted to boot that installer.
Ignoring how dirty that laptop screen is, we’re presented with an error that my particular piece of hardware is not a supported model for HMC. After some further digging, I found out about the virtualization option, and downloaded HMC v9, and installed VMware Workstation Pro (which is now free) and booted and installed the HMC there.
The back of the POWER 720 has a few RJ45 ports – two of which are Ethernet for HMC, and two that are serial ports. I mistook the S1/S2 ports as Ethernet. They are not. Also note, the HMC ports cannot be used as general Ethernet ports for an operating system.
Back to the HMC installation – my ThinkPad has two network adapters, a WiFi and an Ethernet adapter. In my first install, I setup the VM with two NICs – one that was bridged to my home network, and one that was a private HMC-only network. In this setup, I set the HMC-only network up as the default IP that VMware assigned that bridged network, 192.168.1.156. Or so I thought. I entered 192.168.1.146, and wanted to make HMC use the 255.255.255.0 subnet mask. Well, that didn’t work. Ultimately the server was never visible, and I gave up and reinstalled HMC.
On the second try, I left the network hardware configuration the same, but let HMC choose the IP network parameters for the private network. HMC is running the DHCP server, with a rather unnecessarily large class B range. You can see that below where this server shows up at 10.1.0.3. No conflicts with my home network, no fuss from HMC.
After that installation was complete, HMC found my server! I had to do basically an initial setup, setting the password for HMC and such. I also got a notion as to what capabilities this particular server was originally licensed for. The good news? It can run IBM i, and it can run AIX. So I have options.
After setting the password, I could proceed to try and follow the instructions to perform an IPL, or Initial Program Load on the machine. This is basically the boot process, also used to install an operating system.
In the next post, I’ll go through my trials with getting an IPL performed.