Backup and availability of the VIO Server

The Virtual I/O Server partition is a critical partition; it always needs to be available for client partitions. If we need to reboot or recover, all partitions deployed through VIO Server will be unavailable.Therefore, backup and availability considerations are important.

 

 

Backup

Back up the Virtual I/O Server regularly using the backupios command to create an installable image of the root volume group onto either a bootable tape or a multivolume CD or DVD. The creation of an installable NIM image on a file system is provided as well.

 

 

Availability

In addition, you can use the mirrorios command to mirror all logical volumes on the rootvg volume group of the VIO Server on a physical drive, which must already be member of the rootvg volume group.

Here are two main reasons to implement the mirroring of rootvg:

To provide continuous operation of the VIO Server operating system if a disk that is part of the operating system fails, and an active mirrored copy of the operating system exists on another disk.

To be able to boot more than one disk of the rootvg if another boot disk fails. In some cases, the ability to boot from an alternate disk may require some user interaction.

Example 3-20 illustrates how to add a hard disk named hdisk1 on the VIO Server into the rootvg, create the mirror, and show the new bootlist with both boot devices.

Example 3-20 mirrorios command execution 

$bootlist -mode normal

hdisk0 blv=hd5

$extendvg rootvg hdisk

$lspv

NAME            PVID                                VG              STATUS

hdisk0          00cba77f96c080df                    rootvg          active

hdisk1          00cba77f0636e164                    rootvg          active


$mirrorios -f hdisk

$bootlist -mode normal

hdisk1 blv=hd5

hdisk0 blv=hd5