Installing IBM i on a JS12 Blade in a BladeCenter S
If you came to this post for detailed instructions on how to setup IBM i on a blade, read this offical IBM i on Blade document. I’ve wrote about my personal experiences, not detailed instructions.
Just two hours ago, i’ve received a shipment of four 3.5″ 147GB 15kRPM SAS Disks. I installed them into the BladeCenter S immediately.
I used SCM to assign the disks in the DSM to the JS12, and then booted the blade.
VIOS was already installed. So all i had to do was to create a new partition.
After creating the partition, i didn’t IPL it just yet. I needed System i Access in order to provide a console. The Operations Console part of System i Access is not supported on Server versions of Windows, so i couldn’t install it on one of the other blades running Windows Server 2008. At least not directly. So i installed the Hyper-V Role on one of the blades, and installed Windows XP and System i Access on it.
I then IPLed the partition and a minute later i was standing there with a lit attention light. I forgot about the CD drive. Bummer. I assigned the media tray to the JS12 blade, but it couldn’t see the CD drive. This must’ve worked before, because i installed VIOS using a CD. I restarted the JS12, but that wasn’t helping. Still no CD drive that i could assign to a partition. Didn’t find much on the web about this problem either, so i decided to use virtual media to install the operating system.
I logged into VIOS using SSH, downloaded the I_BASE_01 CD Image from our production system using FTP, and imported it into VIOS’s media library. I activated the I_BASE_01 CD Image, and booted. I also enabled the operations console connection (which is fairly straightforward, with just in this case the first IBM i instance having the partition ID 2).
After 10 minutes, the signon screen for the operations console finally appeared. That was kind of a Heureka! moment for me, altough i didn’t really do that much stuff yet.
I chose to install the LIC, and i was presented with a screen that i haven’t seen before – i was able to select the which disk i want to be the load source.
After that, the system started to initialize the hard drive. This was really slow on my system, taking around 5 hours for a single 147GB 15kRPM drive. I hope this isn’t indicative of the IO speed we will see when the IBM i OS is running.
While waiting for the formatting to complete, i tried to find a way on how to turn off the attention light that was lit because of my earlier mistake when trying to boot the partition. There is a detailed IBM document about turning off the attention light using IVM/VIOS. It’s a simple command: chled -r sa -t virtualsys -o off
As you can see from the screenshot (took during the middle of the run), it took quite long. In fact, it even exceeded the three hours it estimated and took 4.5 hours. I have an issue with that – the Intel blades do not need that much for initiating a RAID1 set, or NTFS formatting the disks. Even though they’re using slower 500GB SATA disks. It’s just leaving a bad impression for no reason. And it’s also an issue with disaster recovery.
Installing the LIC had a more reasonable speed, took 2 minutes. After the system IPLd again, i was able to add the three other disks. Adding the disks proceeded at a much more reasonable speed, but then it hung at 99%. After two hours, the system was still stuck at 99%. At that time, I went to bed, hoping the system would be finished in the morning.
And it really was finished in the morning. The next step was to start mirrored protection. It even complained that i was running virtual disks, and a failure of VIOS would lead to the system crashing anyway. I proceeded. As always. the first part was pretty quick, and i proceeded with the OS installation.
As the LIC started, initialization of mirroring began. The first time estimate was fifteen minutes. The next one was 6 hours, 10 minutes, then 8 hours. But then i jumped back to 5 hours. I left for a customer, and looked at the status occasionally. I took somewhere between 3 and 4 hours to complete.
Next, i had to change the virtual media in order to allow the OS installation to proceed further. It’s important to know that this has to be done in the partition configuration, not in the virtual media tab. And that you’ll need to acknowledge the partition change in order to make the media change active (the AJAXy web interface doesn’t make this entirely clear).
After that, the IBM i installation started and proceeded at an acceptable speed. In around an hour, the basic operating system was installed.
After that, installation of the licensed programs started. It halted after just half an hour and telling me i had a screen error (MSG CPF3D92). I suspected a problem with the operations console, restarted the XP machine running OpsCon, and retried the installation (with just the base system). The problem happened again. This seemed odd.
Having no idea on how to proceed further, i retried again. This time it worked(?). I figured it was an OpsConsole problem, probably related to the fact that the machine running OpsCon was virtualized. I quickly installed the TCP/IP utilities, IPLd the system and installed the remaining programs using a 5250/Telnet connection.
While the installation happened, i used an additional session to explore the system. The disks where shown to the system as virtual disks, similar to SAN attached disks. But one of the more interesting parts was looking at the Hardware Service Manager in SST/DST – it was completely empty, and didn’t contain any hardware. For me, this was a moment that was quite indicative of the whole experience – i on Blade is not “AS/400 in Blade Form”. It’s a completely new environment that you’ll need to learn to deal with. You got another layer of indirection (VIOS) with it’s own platform (AIX), plus you have the blade management in itself.
The whole setup took me roughly 24 hours (i started a day ago at 16:00). Of course, the system wasn’t always busy because i didn’t give him any work, but it’s worth to note that setting up a JS12 blade takes considerably longer than setting up a model 515 or M15.
I will now continue setting up our ERP application and make further tests with the hardware. If you have any requests for screenshots or want me to test something out, tell me!
A testimonial on installing a System i blade — The iSeries blog:
[...] Lukas Beeler has a thorough post about his experience with installing System i onto an IBM JS12 blade. [...]
10. July, 2008, 14:11Avison:
Like lots of IBM customers, the setup here seems logical – an i5 blade in the BladeCenter S. We want to be ‘green’ and we like the whole idea. It’s neat. What I just don’t get is how the same IBM I have known for ages now can let such chaos descend onto the i5 world. Do the words ‘plug and play’ have no relevance in this context?
I have the job of setting up small datacentres around the world to run our hosted products. It makes sense to distribute them into our overseas offices. The BladeCenter S with i5 blades alongside other blades is rational – but not with the kind of weirdness Lukas Beeler’s had to put up with. I hate to moan, but this is such a disappointment after all the hype surrounding the launch of i5 blades.
10. July, 2008, 19:06Lukas Beeler:
Hi Avison,
Where do you see the main problem? I’ll agree that using VIOS is rather cumbersome, but i’m sure that this will improve with further revisions and as we gain more skills on the VIOS/AIX side.
I don’t really think that i on Blade is a bad idea – it’s just a Version 1.0 product that needs further improvement.
Regards,
Lukas
10. July, 2008, 19:10James:
Hi Lukas,
I think the idea is that the installation should have been easier, instead of being more difficult to transition to the next big thing. The adoption rate of the blades will be much slower when IT managers realize they have a big headache to get the new technology running, and then for what gain? There would need to be budgets that demand less power consumption and so forth before managers will decide to put up with this type of process for conversion – especially those that are used to the much easier swap-and-go scenario that has been their experience for the past 20 years.
Thanks for your post. It would be great to see more from yourself and others.
James
10. July, 2008, 19:22i on Blade - More details and installing software on the JS12 Blade » Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog » Blog Archive:
[...] i Blade is up and running, and i’ve received quite a bit of feedback on the Installing the JS12 Blade [...]
10. July, 2008, 20:13Richard:
I have seen comments that the SAS disks are worth around 100CPW each, giving a full S chassis 1200CPW of power. I think your experience is going to bear this out and with VIOS it may be worse than that. CPW is, of course, a balanced benchmark where I/O is important and my feeling is that SAS is not a powerful an interface as SCSI.
10. July, 2008, 23:31But for a small business I doubt it will matter, eh?
Dave:
Lukas,
Based on some of the things I’ve heard, 24 hours may be a record. I did have a few questions:
Did you have additional disks available to allocate to VIOS to serve as back-up space? Or, were you planning another back-up method (network, etc.)
Did you load VIOS on the internal drive on the blade or one of the BCS drives?
How long did the initial BCS set-up, including the VIOS install take?
17. July, 2008, 00:02Lukas Beeler:
Hi Dave,
Backup is a problem that i have as-of-yet unsolved. I do have a TS3100 unit in the rack, but it is not attached to the BCS yet, because of a missing cable. That should arrive this or next week.
I have a general on how tape backup using VIOS will work, and i’ve already allocated space for a media library on the rootvg on the internal 147GB drives that are on the blade itself (where VIOS is already installed).
The problem here is that driving a backup from VIOS to the TS3100 is going to be shitty at best regarding media management. If i had to deploy production solution today, i’d just attach the TS3100 to a Intel blade, and use savefiles for everything. This would give me full media management and restore, and just require space on the IBM i disks themselves. Of course, this would not cover disaster recovery – a quarterly Save 21 to VIOS optical media and then moved over to Windows would fit the bill here.
IMHO, IBM needs to address this. We *need* full tape passthrough so i can manage the library using BRMS.
VIOS was installed on a mirrored pair of disks internal to the Blade itself. The disks/capacity where VIOS is installed can’t be used for an i Partition, but you can use them for a media library (Backup/Restore), and you could use them for an AIX or Linux partition.
How long the initial BCS setup took, i cannot answer. The rack shipped physically assembled. All i had to was plug in the network to the management port and updates all firmwares – a task that required around 1-2 hours, but can be done much faster with the proper experience.
Installing VIOS is not difficult, but takes ages (i think around 5 hours). All you have to do is logon to the BladeCenter AMM, start a Serial-Over-LAN Console session to the blade, insert the VIOS DVD, and boot from it (which is simple as attaching the media tray to the proper blade and powering the blade on). Next, you chose the disk VIOS is installed to and let it run. After 3 hours or so, the install will be complete.
You can now logon through the serial console, configure basic networking, download 5GB worth of VIOS patches, install them, enable mirroring of VIOS across the two internal disks and you’re already done.
Regards,
Lukas
17. July, 2008, 03:31Ed:
Hey Lucas….found out something about the disk/CPW relationship….12 SAS disks do not equal 1200cpw…..you have to mirror, so they only equal 600cpw….per IBM….this is only interactive cpw…
Ed
29. July, 2008, 19:56Bob:
Mirroring doesn’t drop your cpw in 1/2.. depending on the workload it may actually add to CPW.. It depends on if your applications are read or write intensive.
27. August, 2008, 17:31Ed:
Well….looks like you were right Bob..
12. September, 2008, 19:47Mirroring does not drop your cpw in 1/2,
but you still only get approximately 1200cpw….which is still pretty slow, and will cause some problems with people used to 2400+cpw…
Ed:
Hey Lucas..
How are things going??…any problems with throughput??…I assume things have settled down….:-)
Ed
13. November, 2008, 15:25altino:
Srs,
regarding backup porblems
The tape will be available soon , the drive will be ts2240 lto4, the i5os will see the tape drive as a device as normally do ( tapxx)
tks
Altino
7. May, 2009, 20:36Ben:
Does anybody have any used JS12′s for sale?
28. May, 2009, 17:23Antonio:
Lukas, great article (very useful to me).
I’m trying to set up a BC-S with a JS12 and I’ve the cd problem: The Vios cannot see CDROM (no /dev/cd0). Have you/anyone solved this problem?
thank you.
12. January, 2010, 00:06Altino:
Antonio,
The vios does not show any cd0 at all or just show it as “configured”?can you see it on IVM (web interface)?
tks
Altino
12. January, 2010, 15:15Antonio:
Hi Altino, “lsdev |grep cd0″ returns nothing, and so “ls /dev/cd0″. From the Web interface I cannot assign the cdrom to a server because it’s not listed (I can only create virtual catalogs, like Lukas did). The Bladecenter has no warnings about media tray; I also tried to phisically remove and reinstall media tray and the cdrom. I just opened a support request to IBM.
12. January, 2010, 20:20thank you.
–Antonio
Antonio (Solved):
after AMM firmware upgrade I finally solved the issue.
13. January, 2010, 14:35Thanks
Cesar Gomez:
Hi, Lucas
I`m installing IBM i from VIOS.
in this moment the Console LAN is connecting, and the SRC Code is C6004031.
What is the steps for the configuration of LAN Console…
its necessary Serial over LAN in the Blade Js23?
What is the IP for the connection and what is the hostname???
I dont know what happen….
Please your help
13. March, 2010, 03:14thanks
Altino:
Cesar,
did you already leave a lan console configured and in a connecting status?
have you IPL the i5 patition D M with microcode cd on dvd drive?
16. March, 2010, 18:12