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For quite a while, we've been installing our POWER5 LPARs one at a time by activating it, booting to SMS, fill all the netboot menus and finally selecting an ethernet adapter as the boot/install device.

But there's another way, which doesn't boot quite as fast(eg. it waits 60 seconds for spanning tree to settle), but you just send the command and all the rest goes automagically.

It's called

lpar_netboot

and works like this:

Partitioning an IBM POWER5 machine with an HMC is, most of the time, an easy but tiresome task. And when it comes to reproduce the same partitioning scheme on more than one machine, it just takes to much time doing it the "official" way. I'm putting the word "official" in quotes, because I won't be giving you any advice on advanced voodoo tactics to POWER5 partitioning here, but just a different way of cloning partitioning schemes not shown on IBM courses

If you asked me what my current job was, I would probably answer something along the lines of "I create and destroy partitions on Power5
systems for a living" and it's true. On an average week, I install between 10 and 40 partitions spread across several systems.

If you've got that kind of work to do, you wouldn't want to spend your time clicking your way through some gruesame application like
WebSM.. And I can do without it as well.

But I haven't found much help on the net, so I have decided to make a blog entry with my HMC commandline cheat sheet which should get
you on the way to partitioning IBM pSeries systems without WebSM