IBM eServer pSeries 690 Availability Best Practices

There are many factors which influence the overall availability of a system. Some factors take into account the base design of the system including which components act as single points of failure and which components are replicated through N+1 design or some other form of redundancy. These areas of the pSeries 690 are controlled by development and are minimized through various design techniques (refer to the white paper entitled "pSeries 690 RAS White Paper").

Other factors are directly influenced by how the administrator of the system chooses to configure their various operating environments. This is the primary focus of this white paper. Other factors outside the scope of this white paper, but for which consulting services are available from IBM, deal with how the system is administered and the various availability management policies and practices established by the IT department.

The second part of the white paper will address the availability factors concerned with the Logical Partition (LPAR) mode of operation. It's recommended that the user interested in configuring an LPAR system for high availability review the SMP sections prior to the LPAR section since most of the LPAR material references back to the SMP section.

The next section will address running HACMP in SMP and LPAR partitions which is followed by the conclusions regarding configuring the for availability.

This paper is best utilized by referencing the following documents or guides to actually perform the suggested actions proposed in this paper:

• pSeries 690 Installation Guide - SA38-0587-00
• Hardware Management Console for pSeries Operations Guide
• IBM eServer™ pSeries 690 User's Guide - SA38-0588-00
• PCI Adapter Placement Reference
• HACMP for AIX Installation Guide
• Electronic Service Agent for pSeries User's Guide