PowerVM, vHMC, HMC, And Cloud Management Console Get Their Tweaks

August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever the system hardware is updated, the virtualization and control plane software for that system also has to be tweaked, and we are finally getting around to covering some of improvements and changes that Big Blue has put into the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the HMC and vHMC management consoles, and the Cloud Management Console that were part of the July 12 Power10 entry and midrange system announcements.

In announcement letter 222-191, we get the hardware tweaks to the stacks mentioned above, and in announcement letter 122-053. There are not earth-shattering updates, mind you. (Why do we want to shatter the Earth? Hasn’t anyone seen the latter seasons of Agents of Shield? It’s a very bad idea. . . . )

With PowerVM Enterprise Edition and the separate PowerVM for Linux spin of that hypervisor, the FW1020 firmware now supports virtual network interfaces (vNICs) and hybrid network virtualization (HNV). To quote IBM’s documentation: “Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) allows a single I/O adapter to be shared concurrently with multiple logical partitions, providing hardware level speeds with no additional CPU usage, since the adapter virtualization is enabled by the adapter at the hardware level. This performance comes at the cost of the loss of Live Partition Mobility (LPM) functionality. Hybrid Network Virtualization (HNV) uses Linux active-backup bonding to allow LPM for the partitions that are configured with an SR-IOV logical port.”

I have no idea if others using virtual NICs have the same live migration restrictions on their virtual machines, but obviously it would be desirable to not have to choose between virtualizing NICs for virtual machines or doing live migrations for data and application resilience. The updated FW1020 firmware also supports active memory mirroring (AMM) on Power Systems, although IBM warns that in the event of a memory failure, connectivity to the Hardware Management Console could be lost.

Speaking of the HMC, the virtual HMC appliance 10.1.1020 has the following enhancements:

Optimized system, virtualization, and service management for IBM Power10 scale-out, mid-range systems, and I/O adapters
Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) management improvements with command line for importing and managing VIOS images and scheduled operation support for VIOS backup and VIOS Shared Storage Pool (SSP) configuration backup
Ability to enable or disable single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) virtual network interface card (vNIC) auto-failover at system level
Ability to specify VIOS level labels for selection of virtual storage and Mover Service Partition (MSP) mapping for Live Partition Mobility (LPM) and remote restart operations
User experience improvements
Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 support
HMC appliance management upgrades

Speaking of the Hardware Management Console, IBM did not put out a Power10-based HMC as yet, but it did tweak the 7063-CR2 version of the machine based on a six-core Power9 processor and 128 GB of memory that was announced back in April 2013. With the enhancements, the machine now has a 1.92 TB flash drive in a 2.5-inch form factor as well as a two-port Ethernet NIC that runs at 10 Gb/sec and 25 Gb/sec speeds that also supports the RoCE remote direct memory access protocol that provides the kind of low latency that used to be only available on InfiniBand networks.

And finally, the Cloud Management Console tool, which previewed way back in May 2017 and which brings together various Power Systems metrics, including server inventory, performance logs, and security updates, is now at the 1.17 release level and the main enhancement is that it has been enabled on all of the IBM Power10 machines.

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