Hardware Graphic User Interface for Virtual I/O Server commands

.

Official Announcement words

The HMC has been enhanced to simplify management of PowerVM VIOS virtual storage and virtual network resources. Management of these virtual resources can now be done through graphical Web interfaces instead of the VIOS command line commands.
The new Web interfaces into VIOS simplify:

Storage device management with views for Physical Volumes, Logical Volumes, File backed storage, disk backed storage pools, and NPIV Fibre Channel
Management of physical optical devices and virtual optical media libraries
Network management, including configuration of fail-over for Shared Ethernet devices

For storage management, the HMC provides the ability to create storage pools, create virtual disks and assign those disks to client partitions, assign physical block storage to client partitions, create virtual media libraries from which images can be added for client partition usage, assign physical optical devices to client partitions, and for NPIV-capable VIOS partitions, assign physical ports of an NPIV-capable adapter to client partitions.

From the network perspective, the HMC provides the ability to create shared Ethernet adapters on the VIOS partitions, including the capability to create a shared Ethernet failover between two VIOS partitions that are participating on the same set of VLANs. The HMC also provides the ability to create a Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) with a physical Ethernet adapter, Logical Host Ethernet Adapter (LHEA), or an Ethernet channel.

----

Warning

Seems to me that describing a Graphical User Interface in words is a complete oxymoran! So below we have a few screen shots but the movie is best way to learn it.

Summary

It could be summarised as create an LPAR on the HMC and then you can do the following actions on the HMC:

Virtual Disk

Create a storage pool then logical volume - connect it to a LPAR
Or allocate whole disk or LUN to a LPAR
Also NPIV devices

Virtual Ethernet

Setup a Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA)
Setup Dual VIOS virtual Ethernet with Failover
Configure virtual Ethernet Switches

Virtual & Physical Optical

Connect Physical CD or DVD to a LPAR
Create a Virtual Optical Media Library (filesystem of .iso images)
Connect images as a Virtual Optical device to a LPAR

Minimum Pre-requisites

HMC 7.3.4 Service Pack 2
Virtual I/O Server 2.1.1.10 Fix Pack 21
- On the VIOS ioslevel returns: 2.1.1.10-FP21
Firmware - recent
- VIOS or AIX lsconf reports: Firmware Level: 340_075
Download from IBM FixCentral -

If you know IVM this will look very familiar

Without logging on to the VIOS and running commands, you can now connect make the resources together.
If using Director 6 or Script junkies you may not be so interested but could use this to investigate your current setup.

Lets have a look

Note:

One LPAR is seen below as "bronze_lpar2(3)" because the virtual SCSI adapter on the VIOS is setup as a connection to that particular LPAR and slot 3
The 2nd LPAR is seen as "Any LPAR" because on the VIOS SCSI virtual adapter is setup as "Any LPAR & Any Slot" - this can be changed to connect to a particular LPAR at a later time. It is highly recommended that this is done to make it clear which LPAR is involved and reduce the changes of a mistake. This can be done in the VIOS profile and then a reboot (mandatory for the future) and/or via a Dynamic Change so that we don't have to restart the VIOS (but this setting would get lost at the next restart.