Using the Activation Engine for the HMC virtual appliance

Learn how to use the Activation Engine for the Hardware Management Console (HMC) virtual appliance.

Activation Engine is a framework that allows various components within a virtual machine to be configured during system startup. To use the Activation Engine, you need to set up an XML configuration profile to allow the HMC virtual appliance to be in a ready-to-manage state on first start. For more information about configuring the XML configuration profile, see Setting up the configuration profile for the Activation Engine. The configuration file can be used to configure the following options:
  • Set Default Keyboard (US)
  • Default Locale (US)
  • Disable Keyboard Setup
  • Disable Display Setup
  • License Agreement and Machine Code Agreement
  • Disable Setup Wizard
  • Disable Call Home Wizard
  • Configure up to four Network Interface Cards
  • Configure Firewall Settings for each Interface
  • Configure Network interface as IPv4 DHCP Server
  • Configure Private and Open Interface
  • Configure Default Gateway Interface Device
Note: The number of Ethernet adapters that is defined in the vHMC-Conf.xml configuration file must correlate with the defined Network adapters in the domain.xml, vHMC.cfg, or VMWare configuration file.

The Activation Engine requires a virtual disk that holds an XML configuration. You can edit the user_data file with a text editor and use the XML configuration guide that is shown in the following example.

To create a virtual ISO disk image with Activation Engine configuration in a Linux environment, complete the following steps:
  1. Create a directory:
    mkdir -p config-drive/openstack/latest
  2. Copy the edited user_data file into the directory:
    cp user_data config-drive/openstack/latest
  3. Create a virtual disk image with the Activation Engine configuration:
    mkisofs -R -V config-2 -o AEdrive.iso config-drive



Last updated: Mon, April 13, 2020