So you know about Power7 Local, Near and Far memory for your actual machine but what is your Virtual Machine (LPAR) actually using? There are three key commands to show you (lssrad, mpstat and topas) and we will look at some example output.   First, we need to define an SRAD or a Scheduler Resource Affinity Domain .  If you have used Resource Sets with AIX WLM or WPAR then you have a good idea what these are like. An SRAD is a group of resources but in our case CPU/cores and the associated memory that is directly attached to it. As an... [More]

Tags:  lssrad topas affinity srad mpstat powervm aix6 power7 resource aix7 domain scheduler

  I got another WPAR question today: From the Global AIX, I can add a filesystem to /wpars/WPARname/directory so the WPAR has access but what if I don't want to have the filesystem mounted there in the Global AIX?   For example: I have a Global AIX filesystem called /tools that I want to mount in to one or many WPARs and appear and /temp in the WPAR(s)?   My first answer is well you can use NFS because I do that all the time and I am a heavy user of NFS - no jokes please. I use NFS heavily!  If the NFS server exports the mount point for every... [More]

Tags:  - filesystem aix global workload sharing wpar partition power7 aix6

AIX 6.1 TL04 sp3 supports the new POWER7 machines like Power 750, 77 and 780, where CPUs can be run at slower speeds to reduce electrical energy use when not busy. This feature is switched on by Systems Director and the Active Energy Manager plugin which talks to the service processor to enables it.  I like the "Dynamic Power Saving - Favour Performance" option.  From the AIX end, the pmcycles command is used to find your current CPU frequency. Before switching on the energy saving: # pmcycles -M This machine runs at 3550 MHz - This... [More]

Tags:  aix6 pmcycles aix aem

  This picture was taken by Shawn Mullen - Security Architect for AIX and cool speaker at the event too. It was taken outside of the Gala Dinner on the Wednesday evening - where we had good food and "interesting" Czech musical entertainment at the beautiful historic Zofin Palace on an island in the main river. From left to right are some of the top speakers at the conference: Ignoring the waiter with the excellent champagne! Jay Kruemcke - Power Software Program Director, USA - Mr AIX to his friends - twitter: chromeaix Patrick... [More]

Tags:  aix aix6 prague ibmtechu power aix7 power7

 Just a quick look at the features for AIX7 - which is coming soon. Take a look at AIX7 Preview for an official statement. The two major items for me are 1) Scaling to 256 cores (or CPUs as I have called them for 25 years) Power systems always had lower CPU counts than the competition particularly in the high end machines due to the faster speed of the processor and this benefits batch (single threaded) work, software costs (lower CPU numbers) and is easier for scaling up but now a truly massive POWER7 machine is near and AIX7 is the OS to run... [More]

Tags:  aix6 wpar aix7 power7