This mysterious AIX CPU Folding area is often misunderstood, so below is what I know from osmosis from talking to various guru level developers over the last 10 years. Shared Processor virtual machines (LPARs for the old fashioned) have a setting called Virtual Processors (or VP for short). This is the number of physical CPUs that the virtual machines can spread out across - in fact, I prefer to call it the "spreading factor" as it is much more obvious what it means.  This can be the upper threshold for the number of CPUs that can be... [More]

Marcações:  power7 powervm power6 hypervisor aix folding aix6 aix7 virtual processor

This is a follow on to a previous blog on " PowerVM Virtual Ethernet Speed is often confused with VIOS, SEA IVE/HEA speed "- here is a Direct Link   I regularly get asked : "I have just heard about this [PowerVM virtual switch | vSwitch | Hypervisor Ethernet Switch] is available but I can't find out any information at all, help!"   They are wanting to run two (or more) virtual switches within the one Power machine to completely separate the network packets of groups of virtual machines (LPARs) so they know for sure there can... [More]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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A new version of Hardware Management Console code with a browser-based graphical user interface is now available. HMC Version 7 Release 3.1.0 is required to support the recently announced 9117-MMA IBM System p 570, the first POWER6 server to be introduced. This code can also support POWER5 and POWER5+ managed servers, although HMC V6R1.2 with its Web-based System Manager interface continues to be available. (POWER4 managed servers are supported by HMCs running HMC V3R3.7.) The support notice on HMC V7R3.1.0 can be found at this web page:... [More]

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After you have started and used your virtual machine (VM) for a while, you may decide to change its size using a Dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) change from the HMC (or SDMC or IVM, of course). This has virtual machine placement implications.  When shrinking your VM, the hypervisor will decide which CPU or memory (LBM) to release and it might not select what you think is the obvious choice.  When enlarging your VM, we might thing there is an obvious way to grow in a balanced way but we can't see: 1) where physically our virtual machine is placed in the... [More]

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

This week I spent 4 hours with a customer covering many advanced WPAR topics and took way a bunch of questions that I had to check the answers and ask the WPAR developers themselves to be sure I had the right answers. If the questions were not clear to my customers and I did know initially know the answers then there may be others with similar issues so I thought I would share the answers with everyone.   1) Workload Partitions - What is the road map? Well, I am not going to make announcements on a blog for sure. If you are new to WPAR, I can... [More]

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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]

Marcações:  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.  With a shared processor virtual machine (I am calling this "VM" but was called LPAR!) there are various suggestions of setting Entitlement ("Desired processing units" on the LPAR profile on the HMC, I am calling this "E") and Virtual Processor numbers (I am calling this "VP"). For Capped, the Entitlement is the maximum guaranteed CPU time that you can't go over and you round up the Entitlement to the... [More]

Marcações:  processor virtual powervm power7 aix low power6 entitlement

 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]

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 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]

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I just noted two great new things to help those running Java on AIX and it seems hard to avoid Java these days!  I was just monitoring a customer machine with 1500 WebSphere Application Servers (WAS) each with 100 to 150 threads so roughly 200,000 threads!!!  More impressing was that just 20 Power7 physical CPUs was supporting this workload.   So here are two things that can help: 1. Java Performance Advisor (JPA) Available for download to anyone on IBM DeveloperWorks website. This is a powerful new tool to help people identify opportunities to... [More]

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So you have Discovered, given Access and run Inventory on your HMC and it is not finding the Servers and Virtual Servers that the HMC is connected too! What do you do next? Well here are a series of suggestions for you to try (this is not an official diagnostics path but might help you out): How much memory has your HMC got? I get people trying to use old HMCs and the original ones had just 1 GB of memory. This is basically not enough these days - in my humble opinion - unless you have just one machine! But how do you find out what you have?... [More]

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