IBM Hardware Management Console

Setting up an IBM HMC, a Hardware Management Console to remotely manage an IBM System p5 POWER machine from 2006. The HMC is a period-correct IBM eServer xSeries 336 from 2006.

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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

00:00 Intro
01:31 xSeries 336 to Hardware Overview
07:06 Getting the xSeries 336 to Boot
11:46 System p5 Hardware Fixes Overview
12:50 System p5 PSU Hot Swap
15:30 System p5 RAM
16:33 System p5 Hard Drives
18:21 Remote Serial Access for the p5
20:54 MRV Secure Console Overview
22:25 System p5 ASMI
22:57 Booting the System p5
24:19 Installing AIX on the System p5
26:54 SSD in the xSeries 336
29:00 Finishing the AIX Install
32:05 xSeries 336 Remote Access Overview
32:35 HMC 7.7.9 Software Install
36:54 Setting up the HMC
38:30 Exploring the HMC
39:48 LPAR Experiment
42:37 Outro

[aednichols]

I like how the replacement PSU gets DC power from its twin in order to diagnose itself and blink its lights.

[andie-retro]

The AIX menu system is called SMIT. The command line version is called smitty. The commands to navigate through the menus and list options are the bottoms of the screen. The idea behind it was they could allow for anybody to administrate and perform basic tasks with it. We builr up custom SMIT screens for our software and lab tools so that people could manage the system easily.
One of the nice features is that SMIT can show you the commands it is about to run by pressing the F6 button. As you showed at login, SMIT also logs all of the commands into a plain text log file so that you can see what was done under the covers. it's a great way to learn how AIX does things.

It's still my favorite UNIX.

[Megabean]

I started the computer club in my high school (circa 2010/11) and my school basically gave us free reign of any computer equipment that had been stored for longer than a decade. I took home old Pre LPO Tape storage libraries, big lead acid UPSs, that same GL380 you played with earlier. We upgraded our server to a Dell Poweredge R905 (I might be wrong but it's quite similar). If you ever see one you HAVE to pick it up. It had 4 P4 Era Xeon CPU's with 24GBs of ram. It used these crazy ram catties you installed in the front. I think it used 512MB DDR sticks. You had to install a weird kernel patch that somehow gave Windows 2003 32bit access to all of it. It took me hours to figure out how to do it when I was 14. They are so rare but out of all of the servers I've owned outside of blade servers, that thing was the most interesting. I have always wanted to play with one of these Power Servers though

[kellingc]

The last time I was dealing with a HMC was late 90's, early 2000's. We had a z390 mainframe with LPARs for the production, regular development, and a Y2K test environment. The HMC was a OS/2 Warp base machine.

[TomStorey]

I think those "light tubes" are actually known as "light pipes".

But man, it's so fun to live vicariously through your adventures with all of this old gear. I wish I had the room and the time to do similar things!

[lpseem]

Nice machine. ~2005 is a period where designers tool full "advantage" of Java applets. Every server, switch, router and firewall required Internet Explorer, specific Java version with all security disabled.
Window manager of Hardware Management Console looks very similar to Fluxbox, or Blackbox. I recognize it by window decorator theme.
Lpars are still beyond kvm in Linux. This 50% of cpu doesn't even has to be a fixed core. Lpar will jump between cores and thread, depends of which one has a spare time for it. Not every feature will work with Linux VM's, they have to be AIX also.
I don't know about ram, but AIX is licensed per core. You totally can have more cores, which then are spares in case of CPU failure.

[TNYFERRELL]

Only touched these things as a DBA, so the exotic and interesting Power hardware was kept away from me and interacted only through a boring DB console. Great to see these being tinkered with at a low level.

[chaseohara]

Quick read on the network card error, but I think what it was saying was that the card was actually "in the wrong PCI slot" so it was responding as intended.

I'm pretty sure one of those PCI-X slots is 100MHz and one is 133MHz. The card is intended for the 100MHz slot, but was installed in the 133MHz slot, meaning it was 'installed in the wrong slot'. If there were two cards installed, the system would assume that you intended for that to happen because something else was already in the other slot, but when there's only one card present, it's 'working as intended' to advise you that you could be using a 133MHz slot for a faster card.

[TradieTrev]

Hey brother, I was thinking that serial IO card would of been used a PLC. I once hooked up a server in a cement quarry to with some fancy weight scales. Because it was that sensitive they needed to stick the server right in where the conveyor system was. The whole plant was running on a custom PLC was pretty damn cool to wire up!

Have to ROFL at your soldering and putting the battery in backwards, we're all human mate!

[Jogybeartje]

This brings back memories... Years ago I set up a brand new HMC together with a brand new iSeries machine. There was a ton of IBM documentation to go with it so it wasn't too difficult. And the HMC looks very much the same as what you showed in this video. Besides two IBM i LPARs I also installed AIX in one. I remember I could move CPU's in units of one tenth between the LPARs.
I remember that at that time two LPARs could not share one DVD drives. So we had to order two in order to not have to go in to the HMC every time the other LPAR needed it. I think IBM has solved this problem by now.
I also remember that this iSeries model had the exact same three fans, and one of them died. The support contract had ended so I bought a second hand one and put that one in. A year later the other two died as well...
Nice video 🙂

[Sagebreaker]

Nice set of machines! One thing to note about the RAID controller on these pServers is in order to actually config the RAID array, you must use the "Standalone Diagnostics CD" to interact with the controller. Now as far as the whole Capacity On Demand thing goes (HW licensing), I believe it only pertains to dynamically adding or removing resources from LPARs, not 100% on that since my only source on that is some obscure sales brochure and my P6 not caring about me playing musical CPU books.

Other than that nice vid! I look forward to more POWER goodness in the future!

[snaeblooc]

Oh cool I used to work on these type of machines when I was working at IBM. I did hardware repairs and replacements. I don’t miss 3am data center visits haha

It still blows my mind that most of the hardware can be replaced while the system is running.

[DarrenMossAU]

Those x336 units were rock solid and super reliable. I ran these as load balancers with 4GB RAM and 2x 73GB drives until around 2014 when we threw (racks and racks of) them in the dumpster. Replaced with VMs that do the same job and boot in about 20 seconds :) Error 162 is time/date not set. Good to see the old P5 running.

[PeterBrockie]

Ahh. Smarch 48th, 1980. I remember it well.

Lousy Smarch weather as usual.

[Arivia]

You're a professional! And I love watching the professional at work!

[proteque]

I used to work on this back in the days. was fun to see it again.

[Ramtechbytes]

I love your channel man! Keep up the great content. I've recently started a role where I'm using IBM stuff and this really helped me learn alot.

[VKFVAX]

You can on that era of system actually manage LPAR's via the IVM system (it's another service like ASM/ASMi) with PowerVM. No HMC required.. though going via the HMC I feel is always the better way and you can have much more serious setups with a lot of options for the VIOS that is ..just not fun over IVM. Very cool to see someone else hobbying this. Nice to know I'm not the only crazy out there. Though I work with this stuff, getting power5-7 systems working at home is glorious fun. :) Really looking forward to your LPAR and WPAR journey. Also those eServer disks that don't work maybe from AS/400 (aka iSeries). They use non-512byte disk block size because of how the tagged memory addressing works with the primary vs secondary storage concepts. Some are 540bytes for instance.. feeding those to a system that expects 512byte blocks will give it gas. If you've got some PC with an old adaptec SCSI card in it that has the "Low Level Format" util in it, you can specify a 512byte block size.. leave that tonking away for a day or so. Shake-stir-repeat for each drive. Also on that machine.. licensing also, you can have Linux/AIX/iOS (formerly OS/400 .. ) on the same system in different LPAR's. Back to OS/400 disks, if you're able to run iOS ..probably v5r3 or v6r$early .. you might want some of those disks on a controller that you can dedicate to the AS/400 LPAR and give it direct access to the storage adapter or have a VIOS that knows how to drive >512b sectors corectly. Best Wishes to you.

[cullmaster]

Ah.. Finally the HMC video 👍🏻 So when is the CSM video ? 😉 Yep another IBM Acronym 🤗 Before the CSM was CWS… Fun fact, the lowest CPU you can give an LPAR is 1/10th 😉

[wesley]

I had the same date/time error because the certificate on the ISO was expired in 2024. Set the date back to 2014 and it installed. Mine is a newer HMC attached to a Power 7 and this video helped tremendously since you have to hunt down the HMC software unless you have an IBM customer number.