Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems. None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did. You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86 system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage now and then.

The real grift was Capacity on Demand, which requires access keys to unlock hardware only IBM provides. That was a lot of "fun" when the system planar died and the new one didn't give me all my processors back. It took nearly a week to iron it out with IBM directly; even the VAR couldn't fix it.