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 power7 power770 hacmp mirror firmware power780 lpm

I HAVE UPDATED THIS BLOG WITH BETTER, UP TO DATE AND CORRECTED INFORMATION FROM THE DEVELOPERS Read the comments for lots of useful information - Thanks Guys for the corrections WARNING: Advance Technology Support (ATS) Europe is getting reports today from users and IBMers that the POWER7 firmware 770 level as a pre-req check missing! could be much better . This results in the HMC agreeing to upgrade your POWER7 or POWER7+  machine to firmware level 770, when it is not supported and does not work. This causes very bad problems: On smaller... [More]

Tags:  warning power7 upgrade firmware

I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it.  Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone".   Really dumb "nmon has stopped... [More]

Tags:  cpu service analyser packs aix nmon nmon2web nmon2rrd power7 firmware

As we all know, the advanced PowerVM virtualisation functions of POWER7 based machines are implemented in the hardware (the POWER7 processor itself and the System Firmware, which includes PowerVM Hypervisor) for increased security, high performance and reliability.  After more than a year of POWER7 field experience and fixes to increase RAS, further development of still more virtualisation functions and improved algorithms for higher performance - it is very important for all of us to install the newer levels of System firmware to avoid already... [More]

Tags:  systems hmc hypervisor firmware 795 power7 power 780 770

OK, this is "blowing my own trumpet" a little but I just finished a 12 minute movie on the best bits of Systems Director. Best in the sense that they "save me a lot of time" and you might like to take a look to see if they can help you too. As I run lots of POWER based machines and lots of copies of AIX, this is why it is very relevant to this AIXpert Blog. The 8 areas are: One Hour Install, Update Manager - HMC, Firmware & AIX  in four mouse clicks, Whole Machine Performance View, LPAR direct to HMC, Active Energy... [More]

Tags:  systesm update manager firmware aem vmcontrol energy hmc active power install director aix