Setting up an IBM LPAR virtual environment

This section describes how to integrate an IBM virtualization environment with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. The IBM logical partition (LPAR) implementation enables BMC to provision SOIs in the IBM Virtual In/Out (VIO) environment. However, you must manually integrate LPAR in the BMC cloud environment, because LPAR is not officially supported by BMC Network Automation.

Before you begin

The AIX administrator must complete the following prerequisites in your IBM environment before you can start configuring BMC Server Automation, BMC Network Automation, and BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

1. Enroll the IBM AIX frame in IBM's Hardware Management Console (HMC).
2. Configure VIO servers for Paging and Shared Memory.
3. Configure the NIM server.
4. Create vSwitches and then associate the VLAN IDs association with the vSwitches.
   You must do this because BMC does not automatically configure the vSwitch and VLAN ID for LPAR (unlike BMC's support of VMware).
5. Make sure that you have connectivity between the LPARs being created and the NIM server.
6. Configure the SAN switch for N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) support.

Configuring IBM LPAR integration with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Perform the following integrations:

• Minimum requirements for IBM AIX LPAR environments
• Installing the AIX server agent
• Adding the AIX server and IBM frame object to BMC Server Automation
• Creating the VGP in BMC Server Automation for IBM LPAR
• Configuring the NIM data store instance
• Configuring system packages in BMC Server Automation
• Editing the pod and network container XML blueprints to be compatible with LPAR
• Onboarding IBM resources
• Using LPAR resources in service blueprints
• Configuring shared memory, resources, and NPIV