UPDATED: Chris Gibson has pointed out a couple of other AIX 7.1 features which have been backported to AIX 6.1 from TL 6. topas screens now allow a freeze / unfreeze by hitting the spacebar In topas you can also page down and page up through the data For more details, see the comments in my post: topas features: sort by column, toggle to nmon or check the AIX 7.1 Differences Guide If you’re looking forward to some of the new features of AIX 7, but find migrating to the new release a little daunting, then it's time for you to put into practice... [More]

Marcações:  ssd mkvg topas solid_state_disk aix_6.1 pv vscsi features vios wpar aix7 aix_7.1 aix6 aix filemon 7

You would have heard by now of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand on Saturday. It was 7.1 on the Richter scale and remarkably – I would say miraculously – there have been no deaths directly from the earthquake reported so far. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, Haiti - which was hit by a strike-slip fault that caused a 7.0 magnitude quake last January - suffered the loss of at least 220,000 lives. New Zealand , which also experienced a strike-slip fault between the Pacific plate to the east and the Australian plate to the west,... [More]

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  WHAT A PERFORMANCE! Many performance commands such as vmstat and iostat can report accumulated statistics since the last reboot. So it's important to know when that reboot happened. The  uptime command will give you that information. Here is the result of running uptime on an LPAR I'm using via the IBM Virtual Loaner Program : <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> ... [More]

Marcações:  virtual_loaner_program topas vlp aix lpar busy performance vmstat tuning statistics uptime free_pages virtual_memory iostat earl_jew paging oracle memory nmon

Better than one-liners Unix commands are cryptically brief at times. That's to save you typing. Well, knowledge is power and you can turn your knowledge of AIX commands to your advantage. Next time you're at a Geek Party and it comes time for trivial pursuit, you can impress your many friends with this question: What are the shortest commands in AIX? f - shows user inforrmation (same as the finger command) w - prints a summary of current system activity. X - starts the X Server. See if you can memorise those answers. It will increase your... [More]

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  Diamond in the SAN I recently cloned an LPAR from a P6 to a less-busy P5 server via a mksysb backup . Unfortunately, after starting up the new LPAR I found that there was an essential directory missing because it had been excluded via the /etc/exclude.rootvg file (-e option on mksysb). Let's call the directory /diamond (its name has been changed to protect the guilty who didn't back it up). I considered my options but each of them had a drawback. Option 1: restore directory contents from TSM Obstacle: unfortunately, the directory had... [More]

Marcações:  mount_point logical_volume mksysb lv chfs importvg chlv volume_group rootvg gentleman exclude.rootvg exportvg tsm aix manners file_system

  Breakfast near the Bridge I'm planning to be at the IBM Storage Optimisation Breakfast in Sydney on Thursday Tuesday 31 August 2010. https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp018.nsf/v16_agenda?openform&seminar=ZAQ9FDES&locale=en_AU If you're planning to be there, I'd be glad to catch up. It's at a hotel right in the heart of The Rocks , which is rich in Australian convict history. It's also about 5 minutes' walk from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In Sydney we just call it "the Bridge" (not the coat hanger). The... [More]

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REDUNDANCY? YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN. In a dual-path VIO Server configuration, your SAN LUNs are (hopefully) protected from disk failures by being part of a RAID set of some kind. Ideally you've also got redundancy of adapters, switches, power and .... well a lot can go wrong, can't it? That's why you protect yourself from any component being a Single Point of Failure (except yourself, of course.) One VIOS down, all LUNs up But what about the VIO server itself? If you have an outage of one VIO Server, you still want your VIO clients to see all of... [More]

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THE COFFEE CUP HOLDER IN THE COOL ROOM When I went to install the AIX 7 open beta , I used the VIO server virtual media library. Virtual. No need to burn DVDs to put in the coffee cup holder in the IBM machine in the cool room a.k.a. the data centre. Did it all remotely, even though the data centre was literally across the room. After stepping through the SMS menus and pressing enter to continue the mksysb restore, the install of AIX 7 took 7 minutes , which was <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P... [More]

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MANAGING YOUR TIME When it comes to diagnosing error reports, being able to check the sequence of events is essential. That's very hard to do if the servers reporting the errors don't have matching time. In his storage blog the other Anthony Down Under gave this advice: Changing times call for NTP . (In case you're wondering, there are people working in the IBM space Down Under who are not called Anthony). So following AnthonyV's call to action, I'm going to show you how easy it is to set up NTP on the VIO server. You can set up the NTP client... [More]

Marcações:  hmc vio_server time_synchronisation vios ntp aix xntpd