The LPAR agent brings online, takes offline, and monitors AIX logical partitions (LPARs). The LPAR agent can also migrate the LPAR from one physical server to another physical server. 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.

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

The LPAR agent supports deployment of a redundant HMC. AIX virtualization supports two HMCs and you can use two HMCs in your LPAR resource configuration. If one HMC fails, the LPAR agent communicates with the other HMC. Hence, you need to set up password-less SSH access for HMCs on all VCS systems in the cluster.

See Required attributes for LPAR agent.

The LPAR agent also provides protection against failure of the virtual input output server (VIO server). You can run multiple VIO servers on a single system. If one VIO server fails, the LPAR agent enables communication through the other VIO servers. Disaster Recovery of LPARs is supported.

See Optional attributes for LPAR agent.

All the nodes of the cluster on which the LPAR is configured to failover must have access to the OS image.

For more information, see the following sections: