How to Format i Drives to AIX Format for the Purpose of Installing VIOS

Resolving The Problem

The instructions to format the drive are documented in the following Redbook:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246455.pdf

Drives that were AIX/VIOS can be formatted to IBM i and visa versa. There is no blocking aix drives from being formatted to 520 (IBM i) and back. The same is true for an IBM i drive formatted to AIX or VIOS. They just have a different part number and fru number. It is possible that the wrong fru number might be called out if it fails.

The first step is to download and burn the AIX recovery CD, which is available at the following URL:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/diags/download/home.html

The file you want to use is the CDlatest.iso file.

There are two possible methods for configuring the drives to AIX format:

o The first method involves configuring an AIX Raid set. Section 4.2.4 in the Redbook has instructions for how to configure an AIX Raid set.

o The second option is to simply format the drives to 512 disk sectors without protection. Section 4.2.5 contains the instructions on how to do this.

The customer has to make a choice if they want to protect the drives through VIOS or through the i partitions. If the drives being used by the i client are external storage, they can be Raid-protected on the external storage. You can not Raid-protect virtual disks within System i; therefore, the only option for protection on the i client partition is mirroring. If the choice is to Raid-protect the drives in VIOS, you should be aware that once the parity set is created, the entire parity set is presented as one hdisk. Then you will have to create logical volumes to be able to assign disks to the i client partitions. VIOS should be installed on a disk outside of this RAID set so that the rootvg is on its own drive. Then that drive can either be mirrored or left unprotected. Because there is no client data in VIOS, if the drive is lost, then VIOS would need to be reinstalled. Having VIOS installed on its own disk will prevent problems with the LVMs for client partitions, if VIOS needs to be reinstalled.