Hello all,
I am trying to clone an entire aix 5.3 machine , not sure on the procedure.Can anyone help on what can be done ?Thanks
Hi Gull05,
You have a number of options, depending on the way the system was built. The simplest way would be to use the "mksysb" command, but this depends on the machine being in single user mode.
You don't actually say if the system is SAN attached or is it an LPAR, could really do with some additional information about the system here.
Regards
Gull04
Hello Gull04,
Sorry i am a newbie to whole aix , Can you explain the command on how i can find the details whether it is with LPAR or SAN.Thanks in advance.
Hi Gull05,
As to the "mksysb" command, you will find all the requisite information in the man pages. To access these, logon to the server and run the command man mksysb for the other information we require the following.
To identify the disk information run lsdev -Cc disk and to identify whether you are in an LPAR run "lparstat" from the HMC
Regards
Gull04
Hello Gull04 ,
Thanks a lot for that .
AIX # lsdev -Cc disk
hdisk0 Available Virtual SCSI Disk Drive
hdisk2 Available Virtual SCSI Disk Drive
lparstat command returned the below when tried from AIX itself
AIX#lparstat
System configuration: type=Shared mode=Capped smt=On lcpu=8 mem=13567 psize=8 ent=0.50
%user %sys %wait %idle physc %entc lbusy vcsw phint
----- ----- ------ ------ ----- ----- ------ ----- -----
1.2 0.6 0.1 98.1 0.01 2.2 2.6 2298033479 29970185
When lparstat command is issued from HMC,it returned the following,
lparstat
bash: lparstat: command not found
Can you please suggest how i can go further , also can you brief about the mksysb command for me please.Thanks
An mksysb is a backup image of the rootvg along with some code to make the image bootable and restorable. You take it, boot a blank system with this image and have an exact duplicate, save for the IP adresses (there is a special point in the boot process to enter new IP addresses to avoid duplicates).
All this information could you have gleaned from the man page, as gull04 has suggested you do. Basically a mksysb does a backupvg rootvg (for the backupvg command see the man page) and ultimately uses backup (has also a man page - read it) to do the backup.
To understand what is in this image do the following command on your system:
lsvg -l rootvg
You will see a list of filesystems similar to this one:
# lsvg -l rootvg
rootvg:
LV NAME TYPE LPs PPs PVs LV STATE MOUNT POINT
hd5 boot 1 1 1 closed/syncd N/A
hd6 paging 128 128 1 open/syncd N/A
hd8 jfs2log 1 1 1 open/syncd N/A
hd4 jfs2 13 13 1 open/syncd /
hd2 jfs2 130 130 1 open/syncd /usr
hd9var jfs2 96 96 1 open/syncd /var
hd3 jfs2 16 16 1 open/syncd /tmp
hd1 jfs2 29 29 1 open/syncd /home
hd10opt jfs2 56 56 1 open/syncd /opt
lg_dumplv sysdump 64 64 1 open/syncd N/A
livedump jfs2 8 8 1 open/syncd /var/adm/ras/livedump
hapowerlv jfs2 32 32 1 open/syncd /halogs
These filesystems (which hold every part the systems configuration) are the filesystems to be backed up into the image.
Regarding cloning a system: note that AIX 5.3 is not supported on any modern hardware: not on POWER7 and definitely not on POWER8. You might want to consider updating to something less than 5 years out of any support.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
Thanks Bakunin,
Spoke to my Manager , looks like we cannot update aix for next 6 months atleast.
I had a look at mksysb, looks like it can clone only rootvg and can you suggest what can we do to clone the logical volume?
Also , can you suggest how to create a new LPAR for holding the destination system ?
Thanks
mksysb is specifically designed to make a (bootable) image of the rootvg with all its configuration data, so, yes, it can only process the rootvg .
You can use the savevg for the other volume groups, which works basically the same as mksysb except for not creating bootable images. Both mksysb and savevg are based on the backup command.
But having several LPARs you should have some sort of backup solution. Why don't you use that for cloning? Create a LPAR, drop the taken mksysb there to clone th system, attach some disks for the application VGs and then restore your (application) backup. Wouldn't that be a viable and relatively hassle-free solution?
I am not sure what you mean. dump the profile of the current LPAR to a file on the HMC, copy that file and change it to reflect the different attributes of the original and the clone system, save the changed profile and and then issue an mksyscfg on the HMC with this new profile. I don't know any other way, but that is standard procedure, so what exactly was your question about?
Notice that you cannot do that on a POWER8 because it won't run AIX 5.3 in an LPAR (that is a hardware limitation). You can do it on a POWER7 if the AIX 5.3 is ML12 (last) and some other limitations (in fact it was supported for a very short time when the POWER7 was released). To be on the safe side you should use a POWER6 (or even older) hardware, but then you will run on hardware that is not supported any more either.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
Sorry, my bad. Now that you mentioned it i remember having heard that, but forgot about it. Good catch.
bakunin