Hardware Management Console Archives

A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End

November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.

Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …
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Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …
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Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.

After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …
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IBM Patches New Security Vulns In IBM i Components, Power Firmware

February 12, 2024 Alex Woodie

IBM has patched a series of moderate security vulnerabilities in IBM i products and Power firmware over the past two weeks. The IBM i flaws span Rational Developer for i (RDi), Access Client Solutions (ACS), and the Java development kit and runtime, while the Power flaw involves PowerVM and its communications with the Hardware Management Console (HMC).

Concerns over security hit an all-time high in the IBM i community according to the IBM i Marketplace 2024 study conducted by Fortra. The survey found that 79 percent of IBM i professionals considered security a top concern, a 10 percent increase …
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Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …
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Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services

July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.

The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM …
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Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM

May 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Earlier this week, we told you about a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when running on Power9 and Power10 systems. IBM found the vulnerability itself and immediately set about to patch the vulnerability, which it revealed on May 17 along with patches to firmware in systems that are managed by the Hardware Management Console, or HMC.

What was not necessarily apparent was that there are plenty of Power Systems customers who do not have HMCs managing their systems and the logical partitions upon them, and this is particularly true of the IBM i installed base, which …
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IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

As we have pointed out …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 50

December 12, 2022 Doug Bidwell

It is another week of interesting security vulnerabilities in the IBM i world, so brace yourself for some research and patching. There are a slew of vulnerabilities that affect the Hardware Management Console for Power Systems, which means any of you IBM i shops that are using relatively large Power machines. There are five new ones, above and beyond the ones we have covered in recent weeks.

First, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Bind (CVE-2021-25219) affects Power HMC, which you can read about here.
```
Affected Product(s)	Version(s)
HMC V10.1.1010.0	V10.1.1010.0 and later
HMC V9.2.950.0		V9.2.950.0 and later
Product		
```
…
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 48

December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

To start right off, there is a security vulnerability in the Hardware Management Console, so those of you who have larger Power Systems that have their logical partitions managed by this out-of-band controller had better listen up. Specifically, check out Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Bind (CVE-2021-25219) affects Power HMC, which you can read about more here.

The fixes for this security vulnerability are as follows:
```
Product		VRMF			APAR			Remediation/Fix	
Power HMC	V9.2.950.0 SP3 ppc	MB04373		MH01944
Power HMC	V9.2.950.0 SP3 x86	MB04372		MH01943
Power HMC	V10.1.1020.0 SP1 ppc	MB04363		MF70302
Power HMC	V10.1.1020.0 SP1 x86	MB04362		MF70301
```
As we …
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