To give is the full title IBM PowerVC (Power Systems Virtualisation Centre) Cloud Manager Edition 1.3.1 (phew!) became available in June 2016.  I think we will be calling it PowerVC Cloud Edition and it came out with the following new features: Regular Standard Edition AIX VM - Active Memory Expansion Dynamic Resource Optimiser – can be scheduled Remove a VM but keep the storage “just in case” Internal database moved from DB2 to MariaDB Novalink improvements  [not covered in this session] Project & user role... [More]

Update in 2017: I had to rebuild my Raspberry Pi due to a failed MicroSD "disk" and followed these instructions again and found I had missed a step: As the root user add to the end of  /boot/config.txt this line: dtoverlay=w1-gpio and reboot. I found the DS18B20 temperatue probes did NOT work if I installed the Ubuntu 16.04.02 server image downloaded from Ubuntu (it appears it is missing some feature I could not fathom) but the Ubuntu MATE 16.04.02 image from the Raspberry Pi website (it took me to... [More]

As Mr nmon I was recently asked about a nmon feature for which the answer was: " You should use the nmon External Data Collectors feature. "  Only  to be told " Eh! "  When I went looking there is a mention of the feature in the nmon Manual pages for AIX 7.2 but I could not find the old the full explanation on the Internet.  Eventually, I found it hidden away on a wiki which was used for testing during a DeveloperWorks update - it was a lucky find before it was scrapped.  So... [More]

I am just using this blog as somewhere to store my reminders and notes for this major PowerVC release . Editions PowerVC now has two Editions: PowerVC Standard for PowerKVM PowerVC Standard for PowerVM Cloud PowerVC Manager for PowerVM You can upgrade from PowerVC Standard Edition for PowerVM to Cloud PowerVC Manager for PowerVM. There is already a PowerVC 1.3.1.1 update - recommended. Also you need HMC 850 and VIOS 2.2.4.22 - recommended. Database As you upgrade to 1.3.1 the underlying database will be changed from DB2 to MariaDB which is Open... [More]

This is me on YouTube - for lots of POWER Chips, Power Systems machines, AIX, PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerSC, Linux on Power videos https://www.youtube.com/user/nigelargriffiths nmon on AIX on Power There are 3 videos for getting started nmon for AIX which take roughly 39 minutes in total Online use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH7TnnFDWVg Data capture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX-buCI53LY Graphing with nmon Analyser (Excel)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH7TnnFDWVg nmon for Linux on Power, x86/AMD64, mainframe, ARM. There are 3.5... [More]

I got this interesting question from Andrew Bielecki ( BieleckiAP 060000HJ8U ) from a different blog entry: I have 10 VIO servers with 16TB storage pool (16 x 1TB LUNs) on EMC VNX storage which we want to migrate to EMC VMAX3. What would be the best way to migrate this pool? Should we add 16 LUNs from VMAX3 and remove 16 LUNs from VNX or should we use failgrp command and mirror pool on VNX to VMAX3? It is a good question as there are many ways to do this operation and you are thinking of two good ones. The actual underlying disks subsystems... [More]

The question I was asked: Can I have two pools in the SSP for AIX rootvg disks and data volume group disks? Answer: no Explanation: Only one pool per Shared Storage Pool.   Alternative is you that could use two SSP Tiers in a single SSP!  Tiers provides more than multiple pool in functions and usability. Question: Is two tiers a good idea? Answer: no Explanation: Tiers have separate LUNs for each tier.  Having two tiers to split these types of LU (SSP virtual disks) use is rather pointless and will reduce performance. You might... [More]

As part of my nmon for Linux open source project, I often get asked questions and I have selected one here that comes up often. The nmon user asks is nmon only reporting 48 CPUs when he knows the machine has 24 CPU and they are 6 core each? The first answer was - Why the heck are you using a 4 years out of date nmon for Linux version?? But once we get passed that shocker, we look in to the details nmon has collected.   From the nmon data in the BBB Section, we have the /proc/cpuinfo file.  It is massive and has large amounts... [More]

Note: For the POWER7/7+ equivalent Blog take this link  AIX and VIOS Minimum Levels for POWER7 and 7+ Hardware  from 2013.   UPDATE: January 2017 This information has aged in the last year and POWER8 has matured. Take this link for the updated information -> AIX, VIOS, System Firmware of HMC - Don't run anything over 2 years old   Below is now out of date: Note the latest and recommended versions will change... [More]

Previous Remote Restart was rather complicated and involved Active Memory Sharing setup, hence the new name. What is it for? You have a running Virtual Machine but the Server it was running on suddenly halt which some machine level issue. The details of the Virtual Machine are available and so it the disk on a SAN device - external to the machine. You just need to rebuild the Virtual Machine on a different server with enough CPU and RAM resources, connect the disks and network. So you can quickly restart the service. This is what Simplified... [More]

Well it is still early days for this new machine (week 5 from General Availability and there was Xmas in the middle) and I get distracted but concurrently running lots of projects.  In this AIXpert Blog entry I am to make some comments on the S812LC OpenPOWER machine regarding Updating Firmware and then Getting the Front Disk Bays working with the simpler RAID Controller (Feature code EC3Y but I am sure the other fancy RAID Controller would be much the same but with fancier RIAD options like RAID5).   The development... [More]

Over the Xmas break I have been busy improving nmon and this is a summary. Below is a summary with pictures: 1 New Performance Statistics GPU First for the OpenPOWER people using the Nvidia GPUs within the S822LC (Firestone) machines we have the Graphical Processor Units and a previous AIXpert Blog covered the details but below is a little reminder: These are the stats on-screen GPU MHz CPU and Memory Utilisation Temperature in C Electrical power in Watts This is also saved to the nmon output file.   MHz Below we now noticed the CPU... [More]

The High Performance guys at IBM thought it would be good to add Nvidia K80 GPUs stats to my nmon for Linux open source tool and who am I to complain about that?  My new best friend :-) Manish Modani, gave me remote access to an internal machine in Austin, Texas from London over the IBM network and once the IBM firewall allowed me on the Austin lab network  I was logged in.   Then the fun started as I know nothing about these GPU devices.  First we came across a NVidia command that outputs a lot of stats on... [More]

I am upgrading my VIOS to 2.2.4.10 which includes SSP5 Tiers functions and LU grow functions and lots of other improvements To keep track of the nodes that still need to upgraded you can use the VIOS cluster -status -verbose command but the details fly up the screen and ate not visible without scrolling back and are gone and I really don't what to see all those massive hexadecimal internal Id's etc.   So here is a quick one line script "ncluster" /usr/ios/cli/ioscli cluster -status -verbose -fmt : -field... [More]