Day: July 30, 2019

The Hardware Management Console (HMC) is a strange beast. Anyone with a partitioned system needs one, and it can be an indispensable tool for anyone whose desk isn’t within 100 yards of the machine room…but it isn’t part of the system itself and it usually isn’t critical to everyday operations once things are up and running. Is it part of your critical path or is it an accessory largely to be forgotten? To answer that question, let’s examine how the HMC relates to your system and how IBM supports the HMC.

The HMC is a tool which allows us to manage the hardware contained inside a Power Systems server. By communicating with the POWER system’s Flexible Service Processor (FSP), it provides an interface to allocate processor, memory, storage, and I/O to each logical partition and manage those resources dynamically. Perhaps most importantly, the HMC lets us access each partition’s console session, which we need when operating in a restricted state. While some of these functions may be viewed as “one and done” tasks that only happen when the machine is first set up, it is important to remember that we never know what tomorrow might bring. Business needs to change and POWER-based hardware is flexible enough to turn corners, but it needs an HMC to do the steering. Your system runs your business, and the HMC runs your system. It should be clear from this relationship that the HMC can’t be ignored.…