I encountered an interesting fact recently when attempting to backup a VIOS. The VIO is running off an old Power Series server which has a HMC. Apparently attempting to run the backupios command from within the VIO cli will fail with an error detailing that you don’t have the proper rights.
Hence, here is a solution utilizing a NIM Server’s NFS share to take care of it all.
Step 1. Create a ssh key from your nim server to the hmc.
Step 2. Issue the ssh command to connect to the HMC and mount the NFS exported directory (from your Nim Server) to the vio server directory
Step 3. Issue ssh command to connect to your hmc and run a command that will backup the system to the NFS Mounted directory on the vio server.
Step 4. Now that the nim_resources.tar exists, I would recommend grabbing some other info from the vio and backing it up (mappings, ethernet, etc).
ssh-keygen
ssh user@hmchostname 'viosvrcmd -m MANAGED_SERVER -p VIO_PARTITION -c "mount nimhostname:/path/to/the/nfs/exported/directory /mount/point/on/vio_partition"'
ssh user@hmchostname 'viosvrcmd -m MANAGED_SERVER -p VIO_PARTITION -c "backupios -file /mount/point/on/vio_partition"'
The above commands will create the ssh keypair, mount your NFS exported directory from the nim server onto your VIO server, and finally run the backupios command which will create a mksysb of the system and store it in a nim_resources.tar file. However, there are some other commands you may wish to run via HMC cli to backup other things. Such as a “make system plan” and “backup profiles”. After that you may wish to copy some info into text files which list the physical-to-virtual mappings.
ssh user@hmchostname 'mksysplan -m MANAGED_SYSTEM -f filename.sysplan'
That will generate the system plan on your HMC server. So you may wish to copy it (perhaps via scp) from your HMC server to the NFS Mounted directory on your VIO server. A ksh script should be able to do all of this for you if you are interested in automating it.