One of the major differences when using Novalink in a customers environment is the establishment of ‘co-management’ mode. When an HMC and Novalink system both are connected to a physical system only one of the devices can be master at any time. This is also the case when you have dual HMC’s connected to a FSP and Novalink. In this case, out of the 3 devices, only one can be master at any single point of time.
There will be many occasions where you have to swap the master from the HMC to Novalink and vice versa, some examples being:
- Firmware updates
- Viewing RIO topology
- Manual creation of LPAR with fibre adapters
- Note: Current limitation on Novalink does not allow creation of LPARs with fibre adapters via the Novalink CLI, this is not an issue if you are deploying LPARs via PowerVC
- System maintenance (power off/o of physical frame)
To determine whether Novalink or an HMC are currently master for a managed system, you would need to log into the HMC and running lscomgmt -m <MANAGED SYSTEM>. This will provide details of the masters name as well as serial number of the device in control.
To have an HMC take control from a Novalink host, you would need to run the command chcomgmt -m <MANAGED SYSTEM> -o setmaster -t norm . To relinquish control from an HMC back to Novalink you would need to run the command chcomgmt -m <MANAGED SYSTEM> -o relmaster .
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