This is a story board about the mystical POWER8 Lift Tool and decommissioning our Power Systems Enterprise E870. The EMEA Advanced Technology Support machine was a temporary loan from the Power Development team in the USA as part of the Early Ship Program for beta testing, skills development, usability testing and feedback plus social media like the YouTube videos, Tweets and this blog.  We have certain enjoyed learning about and using the machine although I must say it was hard work to use up all the 4 TB's of memory!! Well,... [More]

IBM Systems Director and PowerVC make use of a private API to use Shared Storage Pool (SSP) clones of LU (like a LUN allocated from the pool). But there is no command to let you do that.  LU Clones are quick and good for duplicating a master copy for small virtual machines to boot the same OS level and it means greatly reduced disk use as blocks are shared until written too. As there is not VIOS command to clone there is no command to let you see what is cloned and what is not. I tripped over this when trying to clean up my SSP which is... [More]

If you go looking then you can find IBM websites covering AIX that tell you about AIX 7 Express Edition being limited to LPARs (virtual machines) with a maximum of 4 CPUs and a maximum 32 GB or memory.  The idea being a reduces price for small machines hosting small virtual machines. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v71/editions.html You can also find the Announcement of the removal of these two restrictions for certain POWER7 models like Power 710, 720 and 730.... [More]

UPDATED: 30 JANUARY 2015 The IBM Official Technote can be found here http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1020533 It clarifies the mean of the ASMI settings i.e. it is the number of adapter slots AND the specific slots AND a further bug only some settings work until the next firmware release. Even with the newer firmware my recommendation stands: Completely Switch OFF the I/O Adapter Enhanced Capacity feature as you install the machine as it needs a power off - Unless you are running Linux on POWER8 with dedicated physical... [More]

If you follow this blog you will already be aware that we (Gareth Coates, Clive Benjamin, Mike Pearson, Jyoti Dodhia, Rachel Meager and the guys from Lab Servers that are running Oracle, WAS etc performance tests to hammer the machine) have had a Power Systems Enterprise E870 since early September 2014 as part of the Early Ship Program. This program gives access to new machines before they are releases and their matching software for testing, learning and skills development and feedback. It has been very interesting and we have shared what we... [More]

Most of the Power Systems range of servers since POWER7 allow for the HMC organised online hot replacement of: Cooling fans Power supplies and the online hot adding, removing or replacement of: Internal hard disks PCI(e) Adapters. From POWER8 onwards we are not going to have the online add or remove CEC nor adding or removing Processors modules nor Memory cards.  Of course online changes using Capacity Upgrade on Demand is still very much an option.  On the POWER8, I/O Drawers we don't currently have the ability online hot add or... [More]

People share nmon captured data files with me all the time because they would like me to review the data and make suggestions about the hot spot and tuning. I guess they trust me :-) Some user get a little paranoid about the data (mostly due to having to follow many procedures to get the nmon file through firewalls so it can be emailed to me) and ask questions about if it contains information they don't want to accidentally share. Thankfully the nmon data files is just a text file that you can edit with "vi" so there is nothing... [More]

Warning : I need to make it clear that these pictures are from an Early Ship Program machine which might vary a little from the final Generally Available (GA) models from November 2014. For example, missing labels or stickers plus colours of handles and parts etc. The engineering will be much the same.     Our machine is part of the Early Ship Program and we get to run hardware tests before machines are shipped to customers from GA.  These test include things we would never expect customer to do - which can be... [More]

Warning : I need to make it clear that these pictures are from an Early Ship Program machine which might vary a little from the final Generally Available (GA) models in November 2014. For example, missing labels or stickers plus colours of handles and parts etc. The engineering will be much the same. Please see my 8 minute video of the machine on YouTube here: POWER8 Enterprise - Power E870 First Look  http://youtu.be/jOzPTopt7HE These pictures were take by Gareth Coates and the machine installed by: Clive Benjamin, Mike Pearson, Emily... [More]

Yes this is still the AIX pert Blog but my beautiful POWER8 machines can also run that "odd ball" operating system now called IBM i. That should generate some comments :-)   We have a project to install IBM i 7.2 and then adopt it into PowerVC for Capture and Deploy. This feature is in beta test and selected customers allowed to give it ago. It is planned for full release later this year (that is not an IBM promise). If you are interested in testing PowerVC with IBM i visit:... [More]

Assuming you have dozens to hundreds of AIX VM's now running on your PowerVC controlled machines at some point you will have to upgrade the AIX version to keep current and ensure security.   PowerVC does not have OS upgrade functions but it does have features that can help make upgrades safe and simpler.  The upgrading of AIX is already handled by tried and tested methods and to be blunt I am not convinced I want PowerVC to do it as I want to visually check the install worked and immediately address any issues to ensure the... [More]

If while installing SUSE SLES 11.3 on your POWER8 machine from the regular DVD media, you get this on the console after 5 seconds after booting:   Welcome to SuSE Linux Enterprise 11!   Type  "install"  to start the YaST installer on this CD/DVD   Type  "slp"      to start the YaST install via network   Type  "rescue"   to start the rescue system on this CD/DVD Welcome to yaboot version r22.8-r1190.SuSE booted from... [More]

We have the new HMC 8.1 code stream to manage the POWER8 machines. It also manages the POWER6 and POWER7 machines but not POWER5.  I find the HMC Virtual Storage Management panel very useful and saves me time for assigning Shared Storage Pool (SSP) space to virtual machines (VM's) and automatically doing this for Dual VIO Servers without having to log-on to the VIOS servers at all.  It is also good for assigning virtual DVDs to VMs to boot and install the various operating systems, AIX, RHEL, SLES, Fedora, Debian, etc.... [More]

I "borrowed" this from Jay Kruemcke' slide deck but it is important information for all to know

RHEL (6.4 and 6.5) Servers show their PC heritage when you assign server style static IP addresses instead of home network DHCP controlled IP networks. [[That will generate a few comments!!]] I find the /etc/resolv.conf file gets modified after a reboot and so DNS fails - this is a broken as designed feature. I would enjoy someone trying to defend this feature and why it does this for my benefit!  [[That will generate a even more comments!!]] RANT ON I search the network and the comments are the "NetworkManager" is doing this -... [More]

Many people in computing, we seem fixated on "percentages" when talking about CPU use - We need to fix that. When a computer has an absolutely fixed number of CPUs on the time scale of a few years the percentages of the box makes a lot of sense. But in a virtualised world we will have to change. For 10 years, we can do Dynamic CPU changes to a LPAR (Virtual Machine). Yesterdays 40% used is today's 80% because the admin guy  added a couple of CPUs over night. If we look at the percentages and see a massive jump and hit the... [More]

 In the past with the POWER7 and POWER7+ based machines at the lower end like the Power710 to Power740 Models, users had to shut down the whole machine to add, remove or replace an adapter safely. In fact, some machines would power off as you removed the lid.   This is no longer the case with the whole POWER8 range including the Scale-Out Models like the S822 and S824.  These machines do not have the blind swap cassettes which allow the adapters to be removed from the rear of the machine.  So you must have the cable... [More]

Odd. I thought I have put this on this blog before but I can find it now so just in case ... here it is or here it is again.   The SSP4 can have mirrored failure group FC disks to handle adapter, FC cable, FC switch, entire FC disk sub-system, site or VIOS failure. But there is still a single SSP Repository disk.  Isn't this a single point of failure? The answer is " No because you can quickly rebuild the contents of the Repository Disk after it has failed ." You are not meant to know this as it is internal to the VIOS... [More]

I was told that Fedora's latest build for the Power ppc64 processor would support SMT=8 , if you "err ... um"   have machine with a processor that support that SMT=8 !!!  This is not an announcement.   So I gave it ago - here is my report: Getting Ready And I can't help thinking PowerVC would remove all this work, once the new version arrives that support my ... umm err! new machine!!   Update I can tell you know that this was a POWER8 S824 machine as it is now available. Also Fedora 20 does not... [More]

Tags:  ppc64 fedora