[cowens]

NIM restoring to dissimilar hardware

[cowens]

I am trying to restore a mksysb to a different AIX server. The rootvg on the server the mksysb was done on is 136 g in size the target server has a disk of 18 g. The source server's rootvg also contains user data hence the size of the rootvg. When the mksysb was created I excluded all but the OS ( basically just what would be required to restore and have the system boot ). the actual mksysb is about 2.6 g in size.

[cowens]

Now I have tried following the NIM A-Z doc and restored the bosinst.data and image.data from the mksysb and tried tweaking them but the restore still falls with not enough disk space. Any Ideas or is this just trying to push a circle peg through a square hole.

[cowens]

* no mirrors were used for this trick
* also I select the shrink filesytem option.

[ross.mather]

How big was the swap space on the original system? An mksysb is not a tar file so it will take up much more space than the 2.6Gb.

Check the original system with to see how much space the rootvg takes up in your mksysb config.

Another thing it could be is the device drivers are not all installed on the original LPAR so it doesn't recognise the Disks. That would be solveable by restoring the mksysb with nim and giving an uptodate lpp_source to pull device drivers from.

Which hardware are you using, source and target?

[Frans]

does your mksysb source system's rootvg span more than one disk ?
if this is the case add exstra disk to the target ( look at the bosinst.data and image.data )

[cowens]

Okay I got it to work.  First I want to thank all that repied to my plea for help.

The problem was want it was. Not enough space to restore AND create the filesystems. Thats the big thing. Not the space required to restore the data but the space required to create the filesystems. O ya one more thing know the size of the disk you are restoring too. I thought the disk was a 18g drive when in fact it was a 8g drive. Once I replace this drive with the 18g thing went as I had expected the first time.

Because this was a test I was able to go to the system I was trying to restore and look at all the filesystems created under rootvg

#lsvg -l rootvg

I then add up all the space for each filesytem excluding the user filesystems. I added up the boot, paging, jfslog, /, /usr, ......., sysdump. Once done it came out to about 14g required. well below the 18g drive I was restoring to .

Now because I excluded the user filesystems I had to restore the image.data file from the mksysb edit it and remove the filesystem information for these filesystems.

[cowens]

Then define the image.data as a resource and include it when you set the bos_inst.
#restore -xvqf ./midstjunx25 ./image.data
#vi image.data
# nim -o define -t image_data -a server=master -alocation=/export/mksysb_clients/image.data image_data_use
#nim -o bos_inst -a source=mksysb -a mksysb=midstjunx25_image -a image_data=image_data_use -a lpp_source=LPP_53_ML05 -
a spot=SPOT_53_ML05 -a accept_licenses=yes -a boot_client=no jdistjunx958
Then boot the server and restore.
Thanks for all the help.

[ross.mather]

If you need to know the size of a physical disk device use this as root:

getconf DISK_SIZE /dev/hdisk0

Will respond with disk size in Megabytes

[Frans]

you can also do bosboot -s hdisk