Before we look further in to memory affinity we need to recap on the scheduling of processes and process threads of a multi-threaded process to simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) processors like POWER7.  POWER5 and POWER6 had two modes of SMT off (one thread) and on (two threads) - with SMT=on two processes run at the same time (in the same clock cycle) on the CPU-core but using the different logical units inside of the CPU-core (units like the integer maths (there is more than one), floating point maths (there is more than one), compare and... [More]

Tags:  logical core powervm vp aix smt power7 processor power

 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

So a long download of about 7 hours for the 1.9 GB but a reasonably quick install.  Fresh AIX 6.1 TL6 and service pack 6 installed.  See my Update below for a problem with this AIX level. Prepared a /database filesystem for the DB2 database. The Pre-Install Utility told me to fix some file system sizes, more paging space and ulimit - good stuff. The Installer worked fine. The CIM Server install seems to take for ages at the start!  It then refreshes the Common Agent, installed the default "managed" DB2 database invisibly behind the... [More]

Tags:  aix on install systems 6.3 power director power7

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 firmware hypervisor 795 power7 power 770 780

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]

Tags:  power6 workload power7 wpar aix partition powervm

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]

Tags:  whitepaper tuning best tool power6 on power7 practice aix and java

We all know that a VIOS level is only fully supported for 2 years ... right!   If you have problems with an older VIOS, you may be asked to upgrade to a supported level before a fix can be issued.  Most teams run a dual VIOS configuration to allow painless and live upgrades for just this reason. The other reason is to survive a VIOS crash but I have never had a VIOS failure but that would be because I don't go fiddling with them nor adding unsupported software. I quickly upgraded my POWER7 VIOS from 2.1 to the latest VIOS level and made a... [More]

Tags:  power power7 systems aix vios

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

   While I was installing a re-purposed POWER6 machine over the weekend, got round to installing my Dual Virtual I/O Servers, from DVD and then upgrading from there and I noticed a new service pack 2 for the latest VIOS version. It must have sneaked out without me noticing and there is a Interim fix too.  The VIOS 2.2.0.12-FP24 SP2 Readme highlights lots of fixes including some for the Shared Storage Pool feature. A feature that I have been using and talking about (see this blog for more information).     This got me thinking!  I talk to lots... [More]

Tags:  server power7 vios aix recommended levels i/o virtual power powervm

N-Port Id Virtualisation (NPIV) and virtual Fibre Channel adapters - like high speed physical adapters (see an earlier blog) do require memory to operator at full speed.  NPIV effectively turns the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) into a kind of virtual SAN switch where packets are passed through with no changes from the physical adapter to the client Virtual Machine (LPAR).  I found it very hard to find a recommendation in the documentation but was given a rule of thumb.  As before it should be noted that starving the VIOS and the Hypervisor of... [More]

Tags:  thumb power7 of rule npiv adapters aix power virtual

I thought I should summarise the long eleven part Local, Near & Far POWER7 Affinity series.   1) Placement: Find out the layout of your boxes CPU and RAM and if the RAM is evenly distributed across available DIMMs Find out the placement of your Virtual Machines (LPARs) with lssrad -av  - or - topas -M 2) SMT4 : Expect POWER7 SMT4 CPU use to “look” different POWER5 & 6 have two equal threads POWER7 shuts down threads 3 & 4 and even thread 2 - when there is not enough processes running. 3) Entitlement : Only set minimum Entitlements,... [More]

Tags:  lpar aix hypervisor entitlement processor systems firmware power power7 virtual powervm

 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

The SDMC Redbook is available now - actually on the announcement date - so some one was planning ahead! IBM Systems Director Management Console: Introduction and Overview , SG24-7860-00 http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247860.html 6.9 MB and 430 pages

Tags:  "power aix power sdmc systems" hmc power7

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 virtual processor power7 power6 entitlement aix