We just completed a DR test using our shiny new AMI Cloud setup. Worked great, except for one thing: a chicken-and-egg problem to get started.
The AMI Cloud bare metal recovery process involves IPLing the initial volume by having the HMC FTP it and IPL that. It uses the same process as the starter system, where an ICKDSF standalone restore IPLable file and control cards are appended to the front of the volume image. This apparently works just fine, though I have not tried it myself. The problem is that our DR provider doesn't give us access to a bare LPAR and the HMC to ipl with. Instead, we get a z/VM guest and IPL in that. We cheated, and used out VTL to IPL from for this test so we could test everything else, but this is a problem we're going to have to solve. Since z/VM apparently cannot IPL from FTP the way the HMC does, there has to be another way. It struck me that this is a problem IBM has solved already, since I'm sure they make it possible to install the z/OS driver system in a z/VM guest. Do they do so, in fact? If so, how does it work? I'm guessing we could replicate that process with our one-pack system. -- Jay Maynard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
