So far we have created virtual media as copies of physical disks or ISO images. In some cases, however, a virtual medium should be written to by a client LPAR, e.g. to store an mksysb on a virtual CD.

For such cases, an empty virtual medium with a desired capacity can be created with the “vios mkmedia” command:

$ vios mkmedia ms12-vio1 mksysb_aix01.iso 4G
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Note: The desired size can simply be given as an argument after the virtual media name. Alternatively, the form “size=4G” can also be used.

Since the virtual media is intended to be used to write a mksysb, we didn’t specify a “ro” argument for read-only. Listing the virtual media shows that the new virtual media has write permissions:

$ vios lsmedia ms12-vio1
NAME                  FILE SIZE  OPTICAL  ACCESS
AIX_720500_DVD_1.iso    3.56 GB  None     ro
AIX_720500_DVD_2.iso    4.00 GB  None     ro
AIX_720501_flash.iso    7.56 GB  None     ro
mksysb_aix01.iso        4.00 GB  None     rw
$