IBM eServer OpenPower 720, Technical Overview And Introduction

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Chapter 2. Architecture and technical overview
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maintenance performed, or stand-alone diagnostics
performed.
SCSI disk, and Virtual SCSI disk The more common method of booting the system is to
use a disk situated in one of the hot-swap bays in the
front of the machine. However, any external
SCSI-attached disk could be used if required. As
described in previous sections, Virtual SCSI devices are
also available to a logical partition.
SAN boot It is possible to boot the OpenPower 720 system from a
SAN using a 2 GB Fibre Channel Adapter (FC 1977), or
it is possible to boot one partition using the dedicated
2 GB Fibre Channel Adapter or the Virtual SCSI device
related to this adapter. The IBM 2105 Enterprise Storage
Server (ESS) is an example of a SAN-attached device
that can provide a boot medium.
LAN boot Network boot and NIM installs can be used if required.
Logical partitions can use both a dedicated Ethernet
adapter or Virtual Ethernet to accomplish that.
2.11.10 Security
The OpenPower 720 system allows you to set two different types of passwords to limit the
access to these systems. These are defined in the ASMI menus.
This password is usually
used by the system administrator. The
general ID password
provides limited access to the
system functions and is usually available to all users who are allowed to power on the server,
especially remotely.
2.12 Operating system requirements
OpenPower servers support appropriate versions of Linux.
2.12.1 Linux
For the OpenPower 720, Linux distributions are available through SUSE and Red Hat at the
time this publication was written. A software pre-install feature (FC 5005) is available. The
OpenPower 720 requires the following version of Linux distributions:
򐂰 SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for POWER systems, or later
򐂰 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for POWER Version 3, or later
The Advanced OpenPower Virtualization features and dynamic LPAR require SUSE SLES 9.
Red Hat distributions support all the Advanced OpenPower Virtualization functions.
To find full information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for POWER Version 3 at:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/as/
To find full information about SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for POWER, see:
http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/server/sles/i_pseries.html
Note: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for POWER Version 3 supports static LPAR only.