[cdelgadop]

Hi

You're right. Those internal Serial ports can be used to connect that HSM device of yours, only if your servers are not connected to a HMC. Old pSeries p6xx servers used serial port to connect to HMC, imagine the mess when connecting multiple servers. You have to use those multiport adapters and create a network based on serial connections. Then IBM started to use ethernet to connect to the HMC (those HMC1/HMC2 ethernet ports in the rear of your servers) but still used internal serial ports to create some kind of virtualization of those serial devices.

Now if your p520 servers are not going to be configured to connect to a HMC, you can use serial internal ports. If not, please buy a PCI serial adapter.

Hope this helps