I have been installing beta copies of PowerVC, the new IBM product which is available tomorrow 6th Dec 2013. It is quick to install and allows rapid rolling out of new virtual machines to a group of physical Power machines from your list of pre-packaged software images in just a few seconds of your time and roughly 2 to 3 minutes elapse time till you can login and use it.  PowerVC is based on OpenStack which has lots of modules to install and configure.  It is installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL 6.4 on Power or x86 - So it is a... [More]

*** STOP PRESS ***  -  See the update in red at the bottom. I was asked this lots of times at the recent POWER Technical Universities in Orlando and Athens. Compared to a low numbers of local disks The LUNs on a SAN disk subsystem with caching are very fast - even a simple test like AIX install times have halved.  In addition, you don't have to fiddle about with stripping AIX Logical Volumes across disks or retro fit this to rootvg Volume Group filesystems after the install. Compared to a system with a hot bottlenecking NPIV... [More]

IBM announced lots of Power Systems software yesterday but the official announcements are pretty thin on the details. I have many Twitter tweets asking "What the heck does that all really mean?" and the official statements are marketing messages and not technical information like: How do you get that working?   What are the pre-reqs?   What are the actual commands?  What does the Graphical User Interface look like?  How does that help me as a System Admin person? How, in the 21st century, IBM can announce a... [More]

I regularly get asked to run a demonstration for IBM Systems Director but that is a time consuming business for both me and the audience. Especially,  when you can find out every thing that I know from the comfort of you own office or even home office plus Stop, Replay and Pause via YouTube videos. So here is a reminder and hopefully a page I can point to when I next gets asked.   Topic Title YouTube Minutes 1 ISD63 Workshop 1 Techie Intro v2 Link 42 2 ISD63 Workshop 2 Quick Look v2 Link 16 3 ISD63 Workshop 3 Install v2 Link 18 4... [More]

The latest Versioned Workload Partition (VWPAR) Version 1.1.2 is available but largely secret! With this update I get on my AIX 7 virtual machine,  in which I have installed both AIX5.2 and AIX 5.3 support: # lslpp -L | grep -i vwpar vwpar.52.rte 1.1.0.0 C F AIX 5.2 Versioned WPAR Runtime vwpar.images.52 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR 5.2 Support vwpar.images.53 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR 5.3 Support vwpar.images.base 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR... [More]

Most AIX system administrators use: smitty tcpip to add a hostname, IP address, network mask, gateway and DNS server setting to get the virtual machines (LPAR) and AIX on a network.  And as a side benefit  so we don't need to use the ghastly VTERM console any more as ssh or the dreaded unsecure telnet (just don't do it) can now be used - as the root user: # smitty tcpip ... Minimum Configuration & Startup Further Configuration Use DHCP for TCPIP Configuration & Startup IPV6 Configuration Quality of... [More]

When I log on to my home machine being AIX,of course, and type hostname I get: nag@blue:/home/nag$ hostname blue.aixncc.uk.ibm.com nag@blue:/home/nag$ hostname -s blue nag@blue:/home/nag$ domainname aixncc.uk.ibm.com nag@blue:/home/nag$ I get this because when I set the hostname in smitty it looks like this: * HOSTNAME [ blue.aixncc.uk.ibm.com ] * Internet ADDRESS (dotted decimal) [9.137.62.2] Network MASK (dotted decimal) [255.255.255.0] * Network... [More]

I had better point out that any performance tool of AXI command in a POWER Virtual Machine (LPAR) can only see its use of the Physical CPU, the size of its own CPU pool and (if Monitoring is switched on at the HMC), it has a number of the CPU use by "Other LPARs" use of its own CPU Pool.  nmon gets these numbers by default and the nmon analyser graphs this data in the LPAR tab - this assumes its a Shared CPU LPAR. If it is a dedicated CPU LPAR then it can't get any of this Pool data and there is no LPAR tab in the nmon... [More]

I regularly get asked a question like: I have 4 months of data from 25 machines and have to develop a Capacity Planning model to size these LPARs on to new machines but I am having problems with having so much data. What can you recommend?  We need graphs of CPU compared to Entitlement CPU Physical CPU use Maximum real memory use Network MB/s Disk MB/s Disk IOPS Sometimes this data is needed as input in to the Workload Estimator tool or Server Consolidation tools. My standard response is: You now understand Performance Monitoring and... [More]

Tags:  rrdtool nmon2rrd planning analyser linux capacity nmon2web aix nmon

The answer is "it depends" and there is no Rule Of Thumb - IMHO. The 2 times ROT is very old school and for small servers where peaks could really run out of RAM fast and hurt. The worst I saw was 6 times but that was OS guys and RDBMS guys and app guys all said  2 times ... each!!  and then the System Admin guy just added them up not realising it was the same 2 times!  Basically, bonkers and they used 2% in the end. With machines with large memory, say starting at 64 GB, the memory demand peaks will not go too high nor... [More]

When you install Linux on an IBM POWER processor machine (Red Hat, SUSE or now includes Fedora), you then need to add the IBM supplied additional RPM packages. These give you a whole bunch of useful tools like HMC comms so you can Dynamic LPAR change and LPM, diagnostic tools, and configuration listing commands. Plus more importantly nmon :-)   The repository allows you to update your packages as new versions become available and to benefit from fixes and additional functions.  Without these you don't get the full Power... [More]

The fifth POWER Ask the Experts is a one day customer technical event in the UK which ran in Manchester and London on 15th/16th July 2013. It proved to be a very popular free event.  We had well over a 100 people attend which was a mixture of customers, a few Business partners and some IBMers. Agenda 10:00  - Power Systems Update - Pat O'Rourke: Austin Briefing Centre, USA   Download 22MB .pdf 11:15  - Performance Best Practices with POWER7 - Nigel Griffiths, ATS Europe  Download 3.5MB .pdf... [More]

I have tried to get permission to pass on these numbers publically but got no answer at all.  As these are facts rather than opinions, I see no harm in them. So I will work on the old theory: "it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" ... here goes. The AIX Virtual User Group often asks a few questions as part of the registration process for the next webinar session and it generates fascinating statistics from real POWER and AIX users. Observations: The people that join the AIX Virtual User Group are well above the... [More]

Following on from my previous AIXpert blog on 1st July 2013 - "Core files filling important filesystems? Want email alerts about each core dump?" it was pointed out to me by AIX guru Mathew Accapadi that we can for many years use the ODM and AIX error reporting framework to send emails on the generation of core files.  See the previous blog on how to force the core files to a particular directory - and not allow them to fill up important system directories.  On the alternative reporting method see below: Check out the... [More]

Tags:  email aix odm alerts errpt

For an update on what happened and download the session slides go to https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/aixpert/entry/power_ask_the_experts_technical_event_uk_session_downloads

I got asked these questions recently and had to go look the subject up ... again!  I seem to have forgotten some of the details and then I thought I would use some new features of AIX for the second part.  In the distant past there was various way to stop core files being dumped in to the current working directory of the program that failed. In AIX 5.3, AIX 6 and 7, the "chcore" command does all the hard work for us by letting us Choose a specific directory for core files - which is best in it own filesystem so it can't... [More]

A very nice chart from Richard Milton of IBM on the minimum levels for AIX and VIOS of Power7 and Power7+ hardware. Download as a PDF: AIX_Levels_on_POWER7_Hardware_2013_06_20.pdf We will try to update this as new machines arrive.

 I have been looking at some nmon data from an IBMer looking into a customers machine. The virtual machine (LPAR) is running the Oracle RDBMS with 75 dedicated CPUs - on a POWER7 Power 795 at 4 GHz.  The Excel spreadsheet is quite scary at 144 MB thank goodness my Thinkpad has a SSD but not the record by a long way.  Too many data save points can ready add u and so too can lots of processes if you are saving process data. Also with 75 CPU and SMT=4 that is 300 Tabs for Logical CPU, 300 for PCPU and 300 for SCPU and that starts to add... [More]

In Advanced Technology Support (ATS), we like to think we know what we are doing. Then something catches us out and we think that we had better let every other Power Systems administrators know about this or there are going to be many horrified users out there and many complaints.   Note this problem hit our combination of HMC, VIOS and machines - you might get lucky but don't risk it! Gareth Coates (my ATS partner) volunteered to perform the regular 6 month update of our systems but hit a BIG problem.  He writes: This... [More]