We'll continue looking at privacy settings, starting with templates. You can create, compute and storage templates from the IBM PowerVCs gooeys configuration page. These templates define the base settings that will be applied when you create a new virtual machine in the case of compute templates, or volumes in the case of storage templates. Now, what do we mean by that? A compute template could say apply for virtual CPUs, four gigabytes of RAM, and 20 gigabytes of disk. Then when an image or a snapshot of an operating system wants to be redeployed by the administrator, they can simply choose this Compute term and the new virtual machine will automatically get these resources. Similarly, we have storage templates for the data volume that gets attached to these machines. IBM PowerVC provides some compute templates by default. You can use any of these default compute templates as shown here, or you can create your own compute templates. As we've seen before, you can use these templates to set processor, memory, and other features for a virtual machine. You must select a compute template when you deploy an image. You can change the compute template associated with a virtual machine when you resize the virtual machine. Now, notice the create button, you can also create new compute templates from this page. You can specify basic settings such as memory, virtual processes, and processing units. The advanced settings include shared processor settings and minimum, desired, and maximum values for memory, virtual processors, and processing units. Let's see what happens when you click create. Notice there are two template settings, basic and advanced. We've selected the basic option here. Here we give it a name, in this case, we've called it new workload template, then enter the number of virtual processors, memory, processing units, and finally the compatibility mode. The compatibility mode says that this virtual machine was built and supposed to run or be migrated to other machines on the same generation of power servers. In this case, POWER8 is selected, but you could have POWER9 or even POWER10 in your environment. Now, we can talk about the real cool stuff here, the advanced option. When you select the advanced option, more settings are displayed. The advanced settings of a compute template are shown here, but in no particular order. Now you can set the minimum, desired, and maximum processor, and memory settings separately. You can specify whether to use shared or dedicated processors, under the processor shared heading. For dedicated processors, you can check the idle sharing box to specify that the dedicated processor excess cycles will be donated to the shared processor pool. For shared processors, you can specify whether the VM is capped or uncapped, and what the weight will be under the PowerVM, only box shown here. The weight is used to prioritize excess processor cycles for completing uncapped partitions when workloads are high. Another item on the miscellaneous panel is availability priority, which specifies the relative priority of this VM compared to other VMs if a physical processor fails and is not configured. Lower priority VMs can lose a processor if necessary. In the worst case scenario, a low priority VM might even be shut down to provide us processing resources to a higher priority VM. In the advanced section, you can specify the default page, table, ratio of the VMs you will deploy with this template. Enforcing the affinity score check during migrations ensures that the virtual machines affinity score on the destination host will be greater than or equal to the score it had on the source host. Using the SAP HANA recommended values sets the page, table, ratio to 1,024, and checks the enforce affinity checkbox. Storage templates specify properties of a storage volume such as thin provisioning and compression. This makes it easy to deploy Storage volumes and images quickly and accurately. When you register a storage provider on IBM PowerVC, a default storage template is created for that provider. So what is the storage provider? Well, it's any storage device that is capable of providing block storage to your virtual machine. You can also create new storage templates on the configuration page. Each template is specific to one storage provider, but multiple Storage templates can be created for one storage provider. If powerVC finds multiple storage providers when connecting to the hosts, a base template is created for each provider. The admin can edit these templates to manually create new storage templates for different configurations. In this example, we had two sheds storage pools configured on the Virtual IO server and IBM powerVC had automatically created these templates when it detected these pools when we added that HMC connection. Here, we see what happens when you run the create task in the storage templates view. First, you must choose a storage pool name. After selecting the storage pole, give the template a name and select the type of storage. The types are thin provisioned and thick provisioned. These types do not have any advanced settings. Thick provision to create the exact amount of storage that you specify. The thin provisioned option creates the storage, but the space is only used when the VM writes blocks to the device. The unused spaces available for use by other VMs. It's important to monitor the space on the SAN subsystem in this case, because you can over-commit your storage. IBM powerVC creates a network, a definition that matches the configuration of the utilize network when onboarding an existing VM. This definition includes the VLAN ID and their relationship to Virtual Machines using it. To aid with new deployments, a network of definition should be created to specify information that is commonly used with network configurations. Click the, Network's icon on the left side navigation bar on the IBM powerVC homepage. When you click Networks, it shows a table with the current network definitions. Here, we see the add network view give the network a descriptive name, specifying the subnet mask, the VLAN ID, the gateway IP address, and the IP addresses for the primary and secondary domain name service or the DNS servers. Then simply specify whether to use DHCP or static IP addresses. If you click DHCP, the only options are to name the network and specify the VLAN ID. When the static IP address type is used, the IP address for deploying the VM is specified while the VM gets deployed. When you deploy an image, the domain name of the resulting Virtual Machine is under most circumstances, automatically assigned by IBM powerVC, powerVC can determine the domain name for you or you can set a default domain name for a new virtual machine. For example, if you set a default domain name of company.com, then deploy a Virtual Machine named VM1. The fully qualified system name would be VM1.company.com. When you set a default domain name for the newly deployed Virtual Machines in powerVC, that domain name is always used. If you do not set a default domain name, the default is automatically set to the domain name of the powerVC management server. If powerVC cannot retrieve that value and you do not set a default domain name, the default is automatically set to local domain. You can then set the domain name manually after you deploy an image, see the documentation for the operating system on the deployed Virtual Machine for information about how to manually set the domain name. Now by default, the global domain name and domain name for any managed hosts is not set. Restart the nova services after setting the domain name using the powerVC config compute server domain command. This command updates the search settings in the ETC/resolve.com for file and other OpenStack files such as ETC/nova.com. If you wish to become a great powerVC administrator, you should master the powerVC config command. All functions in the IBM powerVC GUI can be executed as a command in the CLI. GUI is preferred for being easy to use and intuitive. CLI is speed of execution such as combining tasks and automation. The subcommands of powerVC config can be seen as shown here, by specifying the help attribute. For example, General is a keyword that can be used as an attribute to the PowerPC config command and inside general, there are keywords like audit, debug, and I have config. That concludes our session. I hope that throughout this module, you've learned some valuable lessons on security and user management, log management, rest APIs, powerVC built-in commands, backup and restore procedure, and several other template and policy related settings of powerVC. You are well on your way to becoming a private Cloud administrator on IBM power servers.
