Reporting problems when the management console is not available

Learn how you can report problems if your management console is not available.

Depending on how you have set up your service environment, your management console might be reporting hardware errors and sending server information to service and support. However, if your management console is not available, you need another way to report these problems. You can designate one of your logical partitions to be the service partition, which means that it has the authority to update the server firmware and set other policy parameters without having to power off the server.

The logical partition you choose to act as the service partition depends on your server model and the operating systems running on your partitions.

If your service partition runs IBM® i, the operating system can monitor the communication path between the server and the management console. If the management console does not respond, IBM i has the ability to automatically report hardware problems.