Test 180: p5 and pSeries Enterprise Technical Support AIX 5L V5.3

System Planning and Design

1. Determine detailed information on the applications (e.g. OS Dependency, compatibility, etc.)
2. Determine Operating system requirements (e.g. AIX 5.2, AIX 5.3, Linux, i5/OS)
3. Evaluate performance data (e.g. average and peak utilizations)
4. Define sizing, capacity, performance and growth requirements of the solution
5. Determine site and hardware requirements (e.g. power, cooling, space, cabling, rack, etc.)
6. Identify application availability requirements
7. Determine back up and recovery requirements
8. Determine LPAR profile requirements (e.g. DLPAR, VIO, micro-partitioning, Adapter, CPU, and Memory, etc.)
9. Determine Virtual IO requirements
10. Determine load manager requirements (e.g. Workload Manager, Partition Load Manager, etc.)
11. Design the hardware and software solution and position appropriate alternatives
12. Validate the proposed solution
13. Determine provisioning requirements (e.g. memory, CPU, etc.)
14. Determine installation and system management requirements
15. Determine specific administrative parameters

Installation and Configuration

1. Verify that components for installation match order, and install plans have not changed
2. Assign boot devices for machine or LPAR
3. Implement an Advanced System Management Interface installation
4. Install OS using appropriate method (e.g. SAN, NIM, Alt Disk Inst, etc)
5. Configure and validate DLPAR and remote commands, including webSM, SSH
6. Verify network parameters and connectivity
7. Configure initial tuning parameters (e.g. SMT)
8. Configure appropriate volume groups, logical volumes and file systems
9. Determine when to select 32-bit instead of the 64-bit kernel

Hardware Management

1. Prepare the server for hardware additions and removals
2. Select resource dependencies (e.g. HMC & p5)
3. Determine LPAR dependencies
4. Manage p5 firmware
5. Configure Electronic Service Agent
6. Maintain HMC software and BIOS versions
7. Plan and perform HMC backup and recovery

Ongoing Support

1. Perform preventative hardware maintenance +Monitor and tune system performance +Manage system software updates +Isolate causes of failure(s) and determine appropriate actions(s) +Plan and perform backup and recovery +Plan and perform disk management

Virtualization

1. Identify the Advantages of Advanced Power Virtualization features (APV) for pSeries Enterprise Servers (e.g. Partition Load Manager (PLM) and Enterprise Workload Manager (eWLM), Virtual LAN, Virtual SCSI, Virtual CPU, Reduce Requirements for Physical Adapters)
2. Implement VIO Servers (e.g. Virtual Ethernet, Shared Ethernet Adapters (SEA), Virtual SCSI, Memory, requirements, CPU requirements, Physical Adapter requirements, Multiple VIO Servers)
3. Install VIO Servers (e.g. Via HMC, Via CD ROM, Via NIM)
4. Maintain VIO Server (e.g. Maintain VIO Server software (backup, restore, update), OEM drivers and applications)
5. Configure and Maintain Micro Partitioned LPARs (e.g. Fractional CPU LPAR allocation, CPU Pooling Shared Processor Pool, Virtual Processors, Capped (Weighted), UnCapped)
6. Determine Client dependencies to VIO Servers