Integrated server overview

Several pieces of hardware and software are combined to make an integrated server.

Figure 1. Integrated server overview

The server hardware is the physical hardware (such as the processor and memory) that the integrated server runs on. There are several types of server hardware that can be used for integrated servers, depending on your needs. The server hardware can take the form of a card that plugs into your iSeries™ server, an external IBM® xSeries® server that is attached to an iSeries server with an Integrated xSeries Adapter, or an external IBM xSeries or IBM BladeCenter™ server that is attached to an iSeries server with an iSCSI host bus adapter. The integrated server can also use tape and optical devices that are connected to the hosting i5/OS™ partition. See Hardware concepts for more information about the types of hardware that can be used for integrated servers.

Each integrated server has one or more connections to a network. Both physical network connections with a network adapter and iSeries virtual Ethernet network connections are supported. See Networking concepts for more information about the types of network connections that can be used with integrated servers.

Each integrated server uses virtual disk drives that contain the server's operating system, applications, and data. These virtual disk drives are allocated from i5/OS disk storage. The integrated server treats these drives as physical disk drives that are contained within the server. However, the integrated server does not actually have any physical disk drives of its own. See Software concepts for more information about virtual disk drives.

Shared devices include all supported tape drives and optical devices that the integrated server can access as if they were local to the integrated server. By default, all iSeries tape and optical devices are automatically accessible by the integrated server. You can choose to restrict which of these iSeries devices the integrated server can access.

Configuration objects in i5/OS describe each integrated server. The i5/OS configuration objects identify the hardware that the integrated server runs on, the virtual disk drives that the integrated server uses, the virtual Ethernet connections that the integrated server uses, and many other attributes of the server. See Software concepts for more information about the i5/OS configuration objects that describe an integrated server.