IBM CSM to IBM Systems Director Transformation Guide

Chapter 4. Functional comparison 95

The IBM Systems Director Update Manager plug-in is installed by default during the

installation of IBM Systems Director and is used to acquire, install, manage updates, and

monitor your systems to ensure that they are up-to-date. A check for updates has to be

scheduled to run periodically and the administrator has to check systems for compliance. In

case of uncompliance the systems administrator has to take action by installing required

updates.

By integrating the IBM Systems Director Management Console with IBM Systems Director,

the Update Manager gains more functionalities and you are able to perform firmware updates

on Power Systems. Some differences in updating Power Systems firmware compared with

traditional HMC are:

򐂰 In distinction of HMC, SDMC requires more update files for an image than just the .xml

and .rpm files; it also requires the .dd.xml, .pd.sdd, and .readme.txt files.

򐂰 Updates and upgrades are done through the same installation flow pages.

򐂰 Management operations (Accept or Reject) are performed through different page flows

than the installation.

򐂰 To update a Power System’s firmware, it has to be discovered in SDMC to collect its

inventory and to import the firmware updates into SDMC.

򐂰 The target system must be associated with the desired firmware package. If this

relationship is not present, then the Install button will not be enabled when attempting to

launch the install. By collecting inventory on the system the relationship is re-established.

As the scope of this book is only to help you to transform your CSM cluster into IBM Systems

Director and to reveal its new funtionalities further, we will not describe a step-by-step

firmware update procedure but present the main steps.

For a step-by-step process, refer to Chapter 7, “Firmware Updates,” in IBM Systems Director

Management Console: Introduction and Overview, SG24-7860.

The Power Systems firmware update process consists of the following actions:

򐂰 Readiness check detects whether the system is in a good state before a code update.

The system is checked for open serviceable events, operational state of the system, and

possible connectivity issues.

򐂰 Getting the updates automatically with Update Manager by scheduling periodical checks

against IBM FixCentral sites. There is also an option to manually download the updates

and import them to IBM Systems Director from a local file system or from an FTP server.

The command for manual import is:

smcli importupd -r /mnt/cdrom

򐂰 Collecting the inventory with the scope to collect the current system’s firmware version

installed on the system.

򐂰 Install the updates with the Update Manager which has a function that enables the user

to compare the firmware version currently installed on the system with the latest updates

downloaded earlier either manually or automatically. If it detects that the installed firmware

is older than the downloaded one, then you have the option to go through a wizard and to

update your firmware.

򐂰 Checking the results of the firmware updates.

4.4 Security

Securing your cluster environment is an important task to prevent unauthorized access to

resources within the managed environment. For both performance and security reasons, it is