Earlier today I received email from a customer reporting their large POWER7 based machines where on firmware 720_64 to 720_90 and their reluctance to take the outage to upgrade it. They were asking for fine details of newer firmware levels and what advantages this would bring to " justify the outage to their user departments ".   To be blunt this is a horror story: I lay awake at night in a cold sweat about stories like this. The customer has the whole "running computers plan upside down".  The question should be " can... [More]

Tags:  system power power795 dashboard aix power770 power7 hacmp mirror firmware lpm power780

Warning: touchy feely comment coming up! I have always found it odd that IBM markets the Hardware = POWER7 a lot and very little marketing on the Operating System = AIX7.    Personally, I have more good feelings and positive vibes for AIX operating system because I log in to every day and use it for hours than I do for the POWER hardware running it. I very rarely go to the machine room and hug the machine!   Does anyone else feel this way or am I sadly alone? Put it another way would you spend two Dollar Euro Pounds (all increasingly ... [More]

Tags:  feely touchy aix7 aix person power7 comment

I spent two days with a "well known brand" UK retailer trying out Versioned Workload Partitions (vWPAR).  Actually, it was with an IBM Business Partner that runs the machines for them- two knowledgeable and fun guys to work with - we were asked by the European manager in the next room to keep the noise down! This Versioned WPAR technology lets you run AIX 5.2 or AIX 5.3 inside an AIX 7 on Power7 Workload Partition (WPAR). You simply get the source AIX up to the required level (which you should already by running), then take a mksysb... [More]

Tags:  versioned partition workload aix aix7 powervm wpar 5.3 power7

Shared Storage Pools is the next big thing to owed systems admin time and boost flexibility  for Power Systems, PowerVM and controlling SAN disks from the VIOS and HMC.  I will not go on about SSP here but I particular like the fact Live Partition Mobility even with SAN disks is ready to go with SSP and there is no need to reZone the SAN disks.   To start using the new and improved SSP, you need the latest Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) - the version name is a nightmare! Who ever thought VIOS 2.2.1.3 FP25 SP01 with iFix was a sensible name for a... [More]

Tags:  power6 power7 aix powervm vios

I have been using Shared Storage Pools phase 2 (SSP2) on the beta test a lot recently and it works well - I am very impressed. One key side effect of SSP2 is that it really makes Live Partition Mobility (LPM) very simple and safe.   But then I hit a problem that stumped me - nothing to do with the SSP2 technology - it was just that I in the Advanced Technical Support group have got rusty in setting up and using LPM.   The first problem that most people hit is that the source and target Power machines must have the same LMB size - the what??... [More]

Tags:  ssp2 ssp lpm vios aix powervm power7 lpar vtopt vm

We all tend to concentrate on the CPU first and the memory second. CPUs, as the "brains" of the machine, does get a high focus and have a lot of extreme technology within it but the RAM is the "guts" of the machine to "feed" the CPU with nutrient data. OK, let us stop the analogy there :-)  Along with reducing the number of CPUs via a lower virtual processor count, we also need to have the CPUs matching the memory - so AIX has a fighting change to localise a running process to its home SRAD and thus have it's data... [More]

Tags:  entitlement ram lpar power7 vm placement virtual aix cpu power6 processor powervm lmb

The title should read "Local, Near & Far ..."  - I will not correct it or links might fail. In this entry we carry on from part 5 but we are going to look at setting the virtual processor number for the virtual machine . There is a side effect that is not obvious and after 6 years of using them, it never occurred to me so perhaps it is news to others too. The problem of virtual processors is that they are ephemeral - i.e. they don't actually exist and costs nothing.  So I find most systems administrators feel they can be generous... [More]

Tags:  powervm processor virtual power7 aix entitlement power6

This is a follow on from yesterdays blog due to Chris Gibson highlighting a question/concern from one of his customers in Australia.They were comparing Power6 and Power7 and the utilisation numbers from the SMT Logical Processors and the graphs look different. I looked at some nmon data (what else!) and yes they are looking different and then I ran a simple generated workload test and duplicated the graphs.  Below I then explain them - once again these are my personal observations rather than an official AIX developers insider statement.   I... [More]

Tags:  smt core powervm logical aix threads aggressive vp processor intelligent power7 power

 I am using the VIOS Shared Storage Pools more these days and it reduces my system admin time and I really like the Thin Provisioning feature as I have limited SAN disks. Any way, I dusted off an machine that I did my initial investigation on and decided to rebuilt the cluster (of one VIOS) now that I know what I am doing :-)    The  command : cluster -create -clustername galaxy  -repopvs hdisk2   -spname atlantic -sppvs hdisk3 hdisk4 hdisk5   -hostname diamondvios1 fails with "PV IS IN USE hdisk4".  PV meaning Physical Volume. Yes,... [More]

Tags:  cluster disks power7 clean storage disk power6 pools reusing aix shared vios

 On Power6 the largest machine was the Power 595 with 64 Physical CPUs (cores) across eight CPU books in the machine - each CPU book having 4 Power6 chips and so 8 CPUs (Power6 is a dual CPU chip design). However, with Power7 that has stepped up to 256 CPUs across the same eight CPU books with four chips but with 8 CPUs each so that is 32 CPUs per book.  I might be stating the obvious but memory access to memory directly attached to the Power chip on which your process is running is slightly faster than memory access via a Power chip near by... [More]

Tags:  near 770 far powervm aix power7 local 795 780 power6

I am working with a larger Power 7 customer and learning lots about life in the large and professional computer room. Oh Gosh!!! My Power Virtual Machine (Logical Partition) is totally busy. Oh Heck!!! Look at all that System time, we have a serious problem!! Or do we? Take a look at the below nmon stats and make up your own mind before scrolling down.         Actually, we are in offices many miles away from most of the Power 7 computers because the machines are split across three sites.  More than twenty Power 7 Model 795's is enough to... [More]

Tags:  tl06 time aix system power performance nmon tl05

I often get asked: How large to make a pair of Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)? The classic consultant answer is "it depends on what you are doing with Disk & Network I/O" is not very useful to the practical guy that has to size a machine including the VIOS nor the person defining the VIOS partition to install it! Added new guidance at the bottom in RED Observations : The VIOS server unfairly gets a bad press but note: Physical adapters are now in the VIOS, so device driver CPU cycles (normally hidden and roughly half of the OS CPU... [More]

Tags:  vios aix i/o sizing power6 virtual server power7 linux

 We have all probably seen or used the topas CEC on-screen view (topas -C command). This is started while logged into one AIX Virtual Server (LPAR) and shows all the other AIX or VIOS (as it is based on AIX) Virtual Servers of a single Power Server. Here is a reminder - this is on-line, on-screen and updated every 10 seconds or so:    Here my Virtual Servers are called purple<something> and below the top machine summary we have a line for each Virtual Server and stats like AIX release, memory use, CPU stats (PhysB is the Physical CPU time... [More]

Tags:  power virtual server aix systems lpar power7 monitoring topas performance

Twenty five years ago on January 21, 1986, IBM Austin launched a new operating system called IBM RT Personal Computer A dvanced I nteractive e X ecutive -- better known as AIX-- with a new system called the IBM RT PC. The system ran on a RISC processor codenamed “ROMP” (for Research Office Products Division MultiProcessor) and was originally marketed as an engineering workstation. While the RT was an unremarkable hardware platform it did represent the first time that IBM really started to get serious about UNIX (AIX version 1 was OEMed... [More]

Tags:  aix