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]

タグ:  power7 systems shared storage 6.3.2 pools director powervm 3

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]

タグ:  power power7 systems aix vios

Fourteen new movies/Video's on System Director on YouTube I have just last week uploaded 14 new System Director movies that were previously a whole day Technical University session and I thought it a good idea to share these with every body. It comes to about 4 hours in total and it a mixture of sizes from 7 minutes to 29 minutes. The focus is on core Systems Director function rather than advanced function plug-ins. It worries me a little that we often try to talk about and sell Systems Director for the advanced stuff but you really need to get... [More]

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It has been a busy fortnight and I just realised I have micro-blogged (Twitter) comments and link but neglected this AIXpert Blog - sorry about that.  Here is a summary and a lot more thoughts that Twitter allows. I actually like the discipline of the Twitter 140 characters as if forces you to get to the point!    Firefox First, I have upgraded to Firefox 10 Enterprise from 3.6 - I was having multiple problems with the older release that had previously seemed to be the only safe one for using both HMC and IBM Systems Director.  In particular,... [More]

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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]

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 At the Miami and Copenhagen Power Systems Technical Universities, I covered what we knew about the next release of Systems Director (6.3) planned for 16th December 2011.    One of the hot topics was High Availability using disk replication for the embedded DB2 database for active:passive fail-over.  It turns out this feature is not  included with Systems Director 6.3 release - sorry about that.   The good news, at least, is that this feature is in development and working for the next release of SDMC, which is based on Systems Director 6.3... [More]

タグ:  systems availability 6.3 director high

I get email a few times a week like "Nigel, what do you recommend for getting a good view of what the whole Power Server is doing, what resources are free for reuse for further Virtual Machines and which Virtual Machines are busy" My detailed thoughts are on the DeveloperWorks AIX wiki here: AIX Other Performance Tools but it appears no one reads websites any more, so I thought I would blog a few examples by screen capture to illuminate what is available. My first Whole Power Server and Virtual Server view recommendation is Systems... [More]

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It has bee a long few weeks traveling to Dublin, Las Vegas, Slovenia, Germany and Sweden to give lots of presentations.  Six Weeks and five countries and the expenses are piling up on my desk. I was presenting a core set of topics like POWER7+ announcement summary, VIOS Shared Storage Pools (SSP3), Workload Partitions (WPAR) and Versioned WPARs to run AIX 5.2 and AIX 5.3, quick introduction to PowerSC (security tools), a Techie "what you need to know about" Systems Director for AIX, and Quick Dips in to Active Memory Deduplication... [More]

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Recently, I delivered a 7.5 hour Systems Director 6.3 Instructor lead demo at IBM Zurich - that gives us 25 more people ready to dive into using it.  It is a very polished building and the IBM Forum is amazing and they even have IBM food :-)  I had to take a second mortgage out on my house to pay for the taxi to the airport (fortunately they take a credit card) and I thought Norway was expensive until now!      Anyway, when I got back to the UK, I decided to perform the Systems Director 6.3 to 6.3.1 update.  You get Systems Director to update... [More]

タグ:  6.3.1 director aix managment power power7 atkupd575e systems

Systems Director 6.3.1 is available   This includes a fix I needed. On a completely fresh install the Update Manager will not work with the NIM server for AIX updates due to a bug that forgets to create /export/um_lpp_source on the NIM server - oops!   Fixed with: /usr/sbin/crfs -v jfs2 -g rootvg -m  /export/um_lpp_source -a size=1G But make sure it mounts by default on AIX reboot.   Find the What's New for 6.3.1   Install the new ISD 6.3.1 update and lots of fixes - you get Systems Director to do upgrade as normal

タグ:  systems director 6.3.1

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]

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The below URL takes you to the top of the Systems Director 6.3 online documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/director/pubs/topic/com.ibm.director.main.helps.doc/fqm0_main.html As a rule I use Firefox 3.6.24 all the time for my browsing as it works well for Systems Director and Hardware Management Console (HMC). Later Firefox versions have "variable" results which re frustrating and that just slow me down. The Firefox developer when mad and got to version 8 suddenly over what appeared to be a few weeks but have realised... [More]

タグ:  director systems firefox 3.6 infocenter docs 6.3

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]

タグ:  power7 aix powervm hmc director power6 systems

LPAR2RRD Briefly, Based on the same HMC data that Systems Director gathers is LPAR2RRD but it saves the data in the famous and excellent rrdtool database and graphing tools.  This is a supported by the developer which is Pavel Hampl, IBM Czech republic, as a personal project tool and does a very good job. For more details and a sample website to look round see  - AIX Wiki page for LPAR2RRD I note this is a sourceforge.net project now - See the above for a link to the project and code Cut from that AIX wiki page for the project here (all... [More]

タグ:  virtual lpar2rrd performance server aix power7 lpar monitoring systems