Re: Does NIM pay for small deployments?
- From: phr <philrand@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:55:02 -0000
On Oct 28, 8:53 pm, phr <philr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 28, 12:30 pm, Christopher Petersen <cpeter...@crystallized-
software.com> wrote:
On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:48:39 +0000, phr wrote:
I'm setting up a small AIX shop: 1 p520, 1 p510, no HMC, 2 production
micropartitioned LPARs + 1 or more testing or other non-production LPARS
on the p520. The p510 is production and not partitioned.
I'm wondering if it I'd be ahead to dedicate an LPAR as a NIM master
server on the p520, and then use NIM to install all the other AIX
instances. The production LPARs and the p510 would need to be standalone,
neither diskless nor dataless.
I've been a Tru64 Unix sysadmin for years, but am new to AIX. I've never
used any network-based installation system. Is it worth time to learn and
setup NIM? Or is it too much hassle for such a small configuration?
It sounds like you're in a situation that I haven't dealt with before, but
I would still say to set up a NIM server. NIM is pretty light weight when
you're not actively using it for something, so there may be no need to put
it on a dedicated partition... Essentially, it's just one more daemon
process and a little bit of disk space (outside the installation materials
you're deploying)...
A NIM server is good for so much more than just installing the initial O/S
image. You can use it to apply patches, install just about anything that
comes in an AIX or RPM format package, automate the creation of O/S backup
images, and a whole lot more. It's also helpful when you want to create
O/S installs that are identical or apply the same change to two or more
clients...
I may be mis-remembering, but I think you're going to be forced into using
the Integrated Virtualization Manager to manage LPARs on your boxes
without an HMC. I think that implies a single Virtual I/O Server partition
per chassis and a limited level of redundancy and fault resilience... If
this is truly a production environment, I hope you'll have multi-pathed
disk of some kind and a good backup solution in place... I've had
exceptionally good luck with virtual I/O server technology, but there are
limitations when you're not in a redundant configuration...
Good luck!
-Chris
Thanks, Chris. Those other benefits of NIS were what I was hoping
for. As for production/non-production with Virtual I/O Server, well,
the best "production" setup we can afford may not qualify as more than
a rough and ready test setup in your shop, but we'll do the best we
can with what we have. If we raised our tuition 10% and told the
students it was for 5 9's of uptime on our student records system, I
don't think they'd agree it was such a great deal. We'll be careful
about backups, of course.
I meant NIM, not NIS.
.
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