IBM Systems Director can not only gather standard inventory information from the operating system running inside the VIOS but also virtualized resources. This information comes from the communication with the Hardware Management Console and the viosvrcmd command. The virtual resources and the client LPARs are stored in the Systems Director database. There is nothing to be configured on the VIOS for this data gathering.
Recently we got a situation where we don’t know the passwords of either padmin/root of VIOS but need to run commands in VIOs. Found an interesting command in HMC called “viosvrcmd“, which will enable us to run commands on VIOs through HMC.
# viosvrcmd -m managed-system {-p partition-name | --id partition-ID} -c "command" [--help] Description: viosvrcmd issues an I/O server command line interface (ioscli) command to a virtual I/O server partition.
The ioscli commands are passed from the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to the virtual I/O server partition over an RMC session.
RMC does not allow interactive execution of ioscli commands.
- -m: VIOs managed system name.
- -p: VIOs hostname.
- –id: The partion ID of the VIOs.
- -c: The I/O server command line interface (ioscli) command to issue to the virtual I/O server partition.
- –help: Display the help text for this command and exit.
Here is an example:
hscroot@umhmc:~> viosvrcmd -m umfrm570 -p umvio1 -c "ioslevel" 2.2.0.0
Since we can’t give the ; or > or | in the command, if you need to process the output using filters, you can use that after “”.
hscroot@umhmc:~> viosvrcmd -m umfrm570 -p umvio1 -c "lsdev -virtual" | grep vfchost0 vfchost0 Available Virtual FC Server Adapter
What if you want to run command as root (oem_setup_env)? I’ve got a method from internet:
hscroot@umhmc:~> viosvrcmd -m umfrm570 -p umvio1 -c "oem_setup_env > whoami" root
You can run in one shot like below:
hscroot@umhmc:~> viosvrcmd -m umfrm570 -p umvio1 -c "oem_setup_env\n whoami" root
If you need to run multiple commands, you can use them by assigning the commands to a variable and calling the variable in place of the command parameter.
hscroot@umhmc:~>command=`printf "oem_setup_env\nchsec -f /etc/security/lastlog -a unsuccessful_login_count=0 -s padmin"` hscroot@umhmc:~>viosvrcmd -m umfrm570 -p umvio1 -c "$command"
Conclusion
When integrating with VIOS, PowerVM NovaLink uses the viosvrcmd command, which allows a legitimate user to run commands against a VIOS in a manner similar to the HMC viosvrcmd command.