PowerPath and AIX upgrade procedure with NIMADM

Question

Hello: I understand that when upgrading AIX in the traditional sense, I am supposed to uninstall PowerPath, upgrade AIX, then reinstall PowerPath, per documentation.  However, what about AIX upgrades using IBM's NIMADM (Network Installation Manager Alternate Disk Migration)? What it does is that I have a NIM server that holds the AIX OS media.  And my AIX server (NIM client) will talk to the NIM server, and clone the OS to an empty disk while the system is up and running, and apply the AIX upgrade to that cloned disk.  And at a later time of my choosing, I pick a downtime and boot off of the newly upgraded cloned disk. In this case, as long as I am not SAN booting, do I still need to uninstall PowerPath before the upgrade, and reinstall after the upgrade?  The whole purpose of NIMADM is to reduce the downtime needed to upgrade AIX.  But if I am forced to uninstall PowerPath prior to the NIMADM process, it buys me no reduction in downtime, but in effect more downtime because the cloning process is an additional time (usually 1 hour) on top of the actual upgrade itself. Thanks in advance! John

Brion2 · Answer

Hi John. We don't have any experience with NIMADM with regards to PowerPath. Based on your request and the functionality that it provides, our Eng team will be looking at it in the next qualification cycle. So, I don't have any information on this today. I can only recommend that you work with your EMC account representative to submit an RPQ.

Thanks, Brion

walljack1 · Answer

I am also faced with this situation. PowerPath 5.5.0.3 has been recently installed. I am booting from local, and I want to upgrade AIX from 5.3 to 6.1. I would prefer to use NIMADM as decribed by John. It is now a year later. Has the Eng team had a chance to evalute this protocol?

jespinoza1 · Answer

Hi! I have approached EMC Engineering and Product Management about this. Currently, Engineering has not tested the tool. My guess is that an RPQ for this was not submitted. Product Management would like to know more about the request for this tool being supported with PP/AIX. Can you provide more details?

1. What is the use case?

2. How would having the tool help you in a PowerPath environment?

3. Who is the customer?

Thank you!

walljack1 · Answer

1. Use case. As described above by John's post of Jan 7, 2011. Prior to migrating the data to EMC's VNX and the intall of PowerPath, my data existed on a Hitachi AMS 500 and was managed by HDLM. In this senario I was able to upgrade the OS by use of NIMADM and then I booted into upgraded OS on alternate disk without any issuses.

2. I need a tool that will allow me to achieve the same results as though HDLM or native MPIO were manageing the luns.

3. Customer. Suffolk University, Boston MA.

jespinoza1 · Answer

Thank you for the additional information. I've passed this on to the Product Manager for PowerPath. You need to ask your EMC account team to complete an RPQ for this. This is a qualification process that Engineering uses to qualify tools like NIMADM. Send your account team this link: http://one.emc.com/clearspace/docs/DOC-27709 . It is a document that explains the process of an RPQ and how to follow up on the status of it.

Hope this helps!

jespinoza1 · Answer

Yes it is. I checked it before sending it to you. It's probably limited to EMC employees only.  Give it to your EMC account team and request the RPQ.  They can start the process.  Product Management will be watching for it to come in since he is aware of it.

walljack1 · Answer

Hi Is the link correct?  It is not working for me. Thanks

J_Faske · Answer

Anyone know if this has been qualified yet?  I have been doing a lot of testing, and have used this method (nimadm) to upgrade an AIX server from 6.1 to 7.1 with no issues.  I'd like to know if EMC ever qualified it's use.

freddyr1 · Answer

J_Faske, are you saying that you can run ODM 5.3.0.x on AIX 7.1? Because that is what needs to work.

In the EMC documentation I can only find that ODM 5.3.x.x is supported on AIX 6.1 and ODM 6.0.0.x is supported on AIX 7.1. But what do you do then when upgrading and doing the first boot of the newly upgraded/migrated AIX 6.1->7.1 machine. It will still then run on the ODM 5.3.x.x? And upgrade to ODM 6.0.0.x later once system is up? Can you even go from ODM 5.3->ODM 6 without causing issues or needing to uninstall ODM 5.3?

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