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APRM® Technical Alert
# 003 |
Suspend Dynamic LPAR operations during Server Firmware Update.
| | Product: | APRM - V5R3M1 and later |
| | OS Level: | i5/OS - V5R3M0 and later |
| | Date: | July 8th, 2005 |
Problem Summary
With certain levels of i5 server firmware a dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) operation during a
firmware update may cause the update to fail and to require the update to then be
disruptive instead of concurrent (that is, a full server restart may be necessary).
Background
With the 01SF230 level of i5 server firmware, it is possible to update the firmware while the
server continues to operate. In the past, the server firmware was updated only
when the system was quiesed.
Issue
During the server firmware update, the process needs to obtain an internal lock
from the server. If a DLPAR operation is being performed at that same time, the DLPAR
operation has that internal lock. The server firmware update will not get the
lock and will fail. The system will then be in a state where
a disruptive activate of the firmware is necessary and so the concurrency is lost.
This is a problem known to IBM and they expect to enhance the HMC code to retry the
firmware update lock request in a new release of the HMC code currently scheduled for
October, 2005 such that it will not fail in this scenario.
Solution
DLPAR operations should be suspended during server firmware updates. For APRM,
this means that tuning should be "held" (that is, tuning suspended) and hardware (IOPs,
IOAs, tape/CD devices, etc.) should not be switched between partitions (using the
MOVAPRMRSC or ACQAPRMDEV commands) during this
time .
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