Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates

October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.

The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this year. Delivery on physical media will be available on December 20. We are not sure why there is such a lag between the IBM i TRs and AIX TLs and this set of middleware. IBM doesn’t explain itself as much as it used to; other IT suppliers explain themselves a whole lot less than Big Blue does, so there is that.

PowerVM 4.1.1 is updated so that the “Caracal” release of the OpenStack cloud controller, which came out earlier this year, can manage PowerVM hypervisors and logical partitions. The updated Power server virtualization hypervisor also supports the new Virtual I/O Server at the same 4.1.1 release, and that new VIOS includes:

Virtual Ethernet Multi Thread and Queue
Virtual optical device (vSCSI) backed by an NFS file
Virtual Fibre Channel enhanced command timing and improved performance and latency tracking
Enhanced device level LPM validation for storage
viosbr and viosupgrade command enhancements to support additional security information (such as users and groups)
Flash Cache enhancements around scalability and RAS

As you might imaging, the new PowerVC for Private Cloud, as PowerVC is now called, is a Power implementation of the OpenStack cloud controllers that runs on a Linux partition and that can also manage other Linux, IBM i, and AIX partitions running on the same machine or other machines on the network. PowerVC 2.3.0 is based on the latest Caracal release, which is the 29^th release of OpenStack that came out in April this year. (The latest release of OpenStack, which came out last week, is called “Dalmation” and probably won’t be rolled onto the Power platform until the spring of 2025 as Power11 systems are looming. Anyway, the Caracal release uses Python 3,11 and supports virtual serial numbers and can do Live Partition Mobility across host groups. PowerVC 2.3.0 can run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 and 9.4.

In this updated stack, the Power-based Hardware Management Console appliances that IBM sells as well as the virtual HMC 10.3.1061 has the following updates:

Support for multiple system code updates in parallel via command line interface (CLI)
LPM Storage Validation new default behavior is Port + disk, with option to override the default behavior
User experience improvements across different functions

The Cloud Management Console 1.22.0 for managing Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 capacity pooling across clusters has the following enhancements:

Auto-detection of PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX and IBM i usage in VMs, enabling PowerHA monitored as Base and Metered Capacity resource without administrators having to manually tag each VM using PowerHA software.
Support warning notifications for expiring software subscriptions of operating system and licensed programs being monitored as Shared Utility Capacity software.
Support export of per minute data metrics for larger time period of up to 24 hours.

This updated middleware and systems software runs on Power8, Power9, and Power10 systems.

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