Yes, it does happen.  When you want to use all the main unit (CEC) adapters slots for high speed adapters like Fibre Channel and the ROCE network and want to avoid adding the extra POWER8 I/O Drawers for just 1 or 2 adapters - but did not realises the ROCE adapters can't do a NIM install.  I think it is actually due to the basic boot code "PROM" not having the "smarts" to run the advanced adapters in a basic limp along mode to run the network for the bootp and tftpboot download before you get a... [More]

I was recently sent pictures and got questions about the handle colours on the Power System E870 / E880 CEC and System Control Unit. On my early ship beta test machine, the adapter carriers have terracotta (red-ish) handles and on GA customer shipped machine blue . Terracotta handles means customer hot-plug capable - but don't just grab and yank. You must to go through the HMC maintenance procedure at the very least for the adapter slot to be powered off to make it safe to be removed.   Blue handles means you (dear customer) should not... [More]

I was asked how to get the inlet and exhaust temperature from a POWER8 machine and the amount of electricity it is using.  This was once done with Systems Director and the Active Energy Manager (AEM) but I a told this does not work with POWER8 or if it does its just luck! At first I thought it impossible but I asked friends in development and they pointed me to two documents that point you in the right direction Here they are IBM EnergyScale for POWER8 Systems... [More]

I had this combination recently and it drove me nuts. Plug the Fibre Channel cable from the Storwize V7000 in to the Brocade FC Switch (IBM 2498-B40 = Brocade 5100) and the ports would not go green but flash orange on and off and end up in Port Status=Disabled and Healthy=Faulty on the switch and the V7000 in waiting for a cable state.  Both the the V7000 and FC Switch are the latest firmware. I assumed faulty GBIC at one or other end and/or a faulty FC cables at first but after trying many combinations and my two new (second-hand from... [More]

This Blog is brought to you by Clive Benjamin (Principal Engineer) who worked out how to do it. If your HMC has a quality high resolution local screen or KVM screen then the Restricted Shell terminal window font size is far too small to read and the font used very narrow lines - in our humble opinion . This blog shows you how to fix this and "no", the obvious window Font Size option does not work. 1) Below: On the HMC start the Restricted Shell window 2) Below: With the cursor on the terminal window used Control + Right mouse button... [More]

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]