Product data

Chapter 2. Installation 17
The supported host operating systems and hypervisors are:
򐂰 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 with KVM (kvm-83-164.el5) or later.
Requires at least one network bridge.
򐂰 VMware ESXi 4.01or later.
򐂰 VMware ESX 4 or later.
The VMWare hypervisor requires another machine to be configured with either:
򐂰 Windows® XP with VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client or VMware OVF Tool
installed
򐂰 Linux (preferably Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.5)) with VMware OVF
Tool installed
For the system firmware levels, POWER servers require 7.3.0 of the POWER
firmware to support SDMC with one exception: POWER6 technology-based
POWER processor-based blades firmware requires level 3.5.7.
2.2 Installation of the hardware appliance
The hardware appliance is required for midrange and high-end Power Systems,
but can also manage low-end systems. The hardware appliance comes
pre-installed on the IBM x86 hardware (a 7042-CR6). Set up and configure the
system with the setup wizard, as shown in 2.4, “Setup wizard” on page 28.
The hardware appliance consists of a virtual image that resides on a Red Hat
Linux configured host system (see Figure 1-4 on page 8). Login to the host
system or access the hypervisor are not permitted. All communications will be
done through a special channel from guest to host.
Guest configuration 򐂰 Four virtual CPUs
򐂰 6 GB RAM
򐂰 500 GB disk (can be thin-provisioned)
򐂰 Between one and four Ethernet adapters
Recommendation: Although the disks in the guest configuration can be thin
provisioned, we do not recommend it. There is no guarantee that the disk
space is there when it is needed, which would cause problems.