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High Speed Adapters need Sensible Memory Sizes
AIX or VIOS Start-up Memory Problems I have been working with a couple of customers that have a newly setup AIX Logical Partition (LPAR) that fails to start due to not having enough memory. The common factor is that the LPAR for AIX (or VIOS) includes a good number of what I call "high speed" adapters like 10 Gbps Ethernet, or 4 Gbps or 8 Gbps Fibre Channel adapters. They tend to have multiple adapters of each type for redundancy and throughput. For example, trying to start the LPAR with 1 or 2 GB of memory but it turned out they need... [More]
Tags: 10gb 8gb fc vios memory ethernet high firbe-channel speed adapters aix |
Massive Memory Savings on your POWER6 and POWER7 machines
I was with a large UK based insurance company last week. They, and their facilities management team, run many very large machines like POWER6 595 and POWER7 Power 770/780. Most machines are 64 core and 2 TB of memory and running 160+ virtual machines (LPARs) on each. These are large, complex and well run machines - all of the AIX images and VIOS are pretty well up to date with current or N -1 releases. A very pleasant surprise and impressed. They told me that even with 2 TB of memory they tend to run out of memory before CPU cycles . Each... [More]
Tags: power7 wpar powersystems power6 ams aix memory ame |
AME Memory Expansion - What is a typical Expansion Factor?
Active Memory Expansion (AME) can second in my Top Ten Technologies to be business as usual in the next few years from hundreds of votes world wide. It is available on Power7 machines with AIX 6.1 TL4 SP2 onwards and AIX 7, of course. This allows memory to look at lot bigger than it actually is - to allow more LPARs to be running on a machine or giving headroom for boosts performance. The usefulness of AME is all down to the Expansions Factor (EF) - which is based on the compression ratio achieved for memory pages. If the EF very low then you... [More]
Tags: memory factor expansion ame ram aix power7 |
Local, Near, Far part 10 - Final of the table by Model
Finally, I have the types of memory by POWER7 model double checked. I refreshed the table in part 1 but thought I should make sure every one sees the final version so I have not mislead people. Only the Power 770/780 and Power 797 have Near memory. All the smaller machine operate a Local memory meaning on the same same POWER7 chip and Far memory for any access to another POWER7 chip's memory.
Tags: local power7 far virtual cpu lpar memory affinity powervm near machine |
Local, Near, Far part 11 - Why Local+Far on Lower End machines?
I have been wondering why the lower end POWER7 machines have local and far memory and not local and near. Perhaps you wondered too! Well at the Miami Power Technical University, I got to talk to Dr Joel Tendler (IBMer) and a POWER7 processor guru and put the question to him. He covered this sort of architectural topic in his presentation at the event and I learnt a lot in this area by listening to the "master". Below is some background and the explanation too. The POWER7 chips has two memory controllers for maximum performance but... [More]
Tags: 795 xyz 780 near systems aix memory 770 ab far power power7 bus local |
Active Memory Deduplication Redbook on a Kindle
Seasonal Greeting. My family decided to give me a Kindle e-book - Wow! So after the usual experiments with reading a book, playing with the web browser via WiFi, I then thought; Could this help me at work too! So reading up I noted it fully supports PDF format files and the IBM Redbooks come in PDF. So a quick download over USB cable and I can read them easily enough in landscape mode. As part of Advanced Technical Support, I am expected to "know everything" and over the past 10 years I have read all the POWER4, 5, 6, 7 machine... [More]
Tags: memory power7 deduplication amd kindle redbook powervm active |
Four new Technical Hands-on Movies
In case you missed the announcements, I have released four new movies this week: Shared Storage Pools phase 2 - Getting Started - movie 101 Active Memory Deduplication Theory - movie 102 Active System Optimizer - movie 103 System Director 6.3 First Use - movie 104 Catch them all at the home of POWER6, POWER7, PowerVM, Systems Director and AIX Movies - or save this link for 21 hours of intensive techie learning - http://tinyurl.com/AIXmovies ps: The previous movie last month about installing Systems Director 6.3 on AIX is a good movie... [More]
Tags: director active optiimizer deduplication memory power7 powervm systems aix |
AIX Memory Usage - or - Who is using the memory and how?
Common question: I see XX% of Used Memory but I don't know who is using it and how? A simple question but there is no simple answer as memory use if complex. nmon then hit "m" will quickly show you a few big uses of memory as below: The shared memory used by lots of applications like DB2 and Oracle - check the SEGSZ for the size. The Owner column usually tells you what it is used for like the oracle user for the SGA or db2inst1 for the DB2 buffer cache. Then it is down to the processes and this gets... [More]
Tags: nmon aix ipcs power memory svmon ram use |
