POWER8 Lift Tool and decommissioning our Power E870
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]
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Shared Storage Pools and LU clones
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]
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AIX 7 Express Edition is available on S822 and S814
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]
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Power System E870/E880 - Reserved Memory too high by 100's GB?
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]
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Power System E870/E880 & HMC 8.2 Early Experience with Wrinkles
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]
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Experiments in Power Server Evacuation via LPM & HMC CLI
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]
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nmon Data Files: Are they a Security Risk?
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]
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POWER8 Enterprise Power E870 - 2nd Look at the Cabling
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]
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POWER8 Enterprise - Power E870 - First Look
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]
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Shock horror: IBM i and 5250 terminal error '0023 No information retrieved - verify configuration'
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]
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Upgrading PowerVC controlled AIX Virtual Machine
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]
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SUSE SLES 11 on POWER8 install: Can't allocate memory for kernel image !
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]
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HMC 8.1 Virtual Storage Management GUI Buglet!
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]
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AIX Releases for POWER8 and which features available.
I "borrowed" this from Jay Kruemcke' slide deck but it is important information for all to know
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FIXED RHEL 6 with Static IP Botching /etc/resolv.conf on Reboot
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]
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CPU Percentages are "Old School", Complicated and often Misleading
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]
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POWER8 Scale-Out models have Adapter Hot-Plug (Hot-Swap)
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]
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VIOS Shared Storage Pool Single Repository Disk = Not a Problem
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]
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Fun with Fedora 20 Linux on POWER*
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]
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Power Systems Hosting Modes - Sometimes too flexible!
With Power Systems there are many ways to run your Operating System(s) and each has advantages and each has a different install process. 1 Native Headless Whole Machine Mode Number of operating systems = 1 Operating Systems: AIX, IBM i, Linux Console = RS232 Dumb terminal Virtual Machines = none Machine types = Blades, Power Systems or PowerLinux (only runs Linux, of course) Comments:
Can't make use of the Power hardware based virtualisation advantage. Typically, the install would be from physical DVD for simplicity or for larger roll... [More]
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