The LPAR agent brings online, takes offline, and monitors AIX logical partitions (LPARs). VCS monitors and manages LPARs and uses the LPAR agent to make LPARs highly available. The LPAR which is a VCS node and controls other LPARs on the physical server is referred to as management LPAR in this document.

Each managed system (physical server with AIX logical partitions) uses a Hardware Management Console (HMC) to manage the software configuration and operation of LPARs. It also monitors and identifies hardware problems.

The LPAR agent communicates with HMC to manage and check the status of LPARs. Hence, you need to set up passwordless SSH access for HMC on all VCS systems in the cluster.

All the nodes of the cluster, where the LPAR is configured to be able to failover, should have access to the OS image.