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

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 install on systems 6.3 power director power7

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 power6 tool on power7 practice aix and java

I am preparing sessions for a POWER/AIX Technical Conference in Norway - unfortunately the only place they could book for the event was a Ski Resort up in the mountains and there is still good snow. It is a tough gig but someone has to do it :-)  As part of that conference, I am updating them on Systems Director and demonstrating it. I had a slide with these hints and tips. A slide with zero percent marks for style (far to many words and just a long list) and I thought ... I should share these with everyone, so here they are. Most of these are... [More]

Tags:  vios power7 aix endpoint systems nim director server power

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

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

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

The official rPerf rating (relative performance rating of Power based machines) are available in the pSeries, System p and now Power Systems "Facts and Features" documents that are on the IBM website. It is best to use Google for them (searching for "pseries Facts and Features" works for me). You may want to know the rPerf rating for your LPAR and an LPAR that is not one of the officially rated numbers of CPUs/Cores.  There may be ratings for 8 and 16 CPUs but your LPAR has 13 CPUs! Well, you can run the rperf script on the... [More]

Tags:  rperf power6 pwer4 aix power power7 power5

Finally, I found the time to try this new exciting feature and it was really simple to create and operate.  I captured movie footage of my first attempt and it all worked (once I removed my spelling mistakes in commands). It only took two commands.  So the technology has advanced concepts but it really easy to use, COOL!    Some of the commands come with long option names like "-custername". A quick misquote from Star-Trek, never goes wrong: "It is UNIX Jim, but not as we know it!" One command to create my cluster,... [More]

Tags:  power provioning pool powervm power6 shared nextgen vios thin storage aix power7

 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

  The new  VIOS Shared Storage Pools 3 (SSP3) arrived a month ago and I have all my VIOS updated now to VIOS 2.2.2.1 plus fixes. This brings with it the regular VIOS improvements but also new features for SSP3 including: Better pool use stats for example see the below lssp command and the Used percentage and Unused(mb) columns and the over view output too has new data $ lssp -clustername stars -sp atlantic -bd Lu Name     Size(mb) ProvisionType %Used Unused(mb) Lu Udid orange7a    32768    THIN             9% 29615        7d58538152 …... [More]

Tags:  power7 systems storage shared 6.3.2 pools director powervm 3

Ganglia is a open source performance and configuration tool that collects data from a tiny daemon on each OS and then creates a Web server based graphical tools to draw performance data and show the configuration. With a few add-ons, you can dynamically decide the historical data you want graphed and with POWER add-ons you get the PowerVM stats for shared processors, Entitlement, physical CPU use etc.  Under the covers it is using the amazing rrdtool so you can extract the data for other uses and it automatically space manages the data. By... [More]

Tags:  powervm aix cec power7 power6 performance ganglia monitoring linux

I have just upgraded my EMEA Power Systems Advanced Technical Support internal Wiki Apache Web-server to the very latest AIX level, which is AIX 6.1 Technology Level 6 Service Pack 5 or AIX6.1TL6sp5 for short! Then I noticed that the nmon at this AIX level has been updated - I worked the code for the internal prototype of this new feature some time ago and it has arrived in the official topas/nmon code at this release - C O O L .   The latest release AIX 7.1 service pack has this new options too. The problem: As the numbers of CPU goes up with... [More]

Tags:  power6 power7 tl06 6.1 sp5 aix monitoring topas nmon physical cpu

I just realised that I got help from the AIX developers to explain the output of the mpstat -d command for my POWER7 and Affinity Technical University sessions in Miami and Copenhagen that I never passed on to every one.  In an earlier blog we examined some mpstat columns but skipped others.   The nearly undocumented mpstat stats are: S0rd, S1rd, S2rd, S3rd, S4rdand S5rd. In the AIX manuals it states: S0rd = The percentage of thread re-dispatches within the scheduling affinity domain 0.  And likewise for the other numbers - but what does... [More]

Tags:  cpu power7 affinity virtual physical logical