Hi, I am just back from the Prague Technical University last week. Everything worked well at the conference at the Hilton and the sessions were excellent - even the ones that I ran :-)   but I keep making one mistake ... I volunteer to give an extra session or two. I ran the following sessions: Systems Director Lecture for AIX/POWER Users This covers the basics for a techie that needs to get it running including the architecture/components, pre-requisites, Advanced plug-in selection, The Systems Director Editions for reduced cost, compared... [More]

Tags:  systems power aix power7 director

There were a number of announcements made today by Power Systems including new hardware features, a new platform management console, and new PowerVM virtualization capabilities. Two new Power Systems blade servers were announced, the PS703 and PS704 . The PS703 blade supports up to 16 processor cores in a single BladeCenter slot and the PS704 supports up to 32 cores in a double-wide blade.   The PS703 and PS704 also support a new solid state drive option. The Power 750 Express server has new processor options or 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket... [More]

Tags:  powervm power aix systems

I am preparing sessions for a POWER/AIX Technical Conference in Norway - unfortunately the only place they could book for the event was a Ski Resort up in the mountains and there is still good snow. It is a tough gig but someone has to do it :-)  As part of that conference, I am updating them on Systems Director and demonstrating it. I had a slide with these hints and tips. A slide with zero percent marks for style (far to many words and just a long list) and I thought ... I should share these with everyone, so here they are. Most of these are... [More]

Tags:  vios power7 aix endpoint systems nim director server power

I was with a large UK based insurance company last week. They, and their facilities management team, run many very large machines like POWER6 595 and POWER7 Power 770/780.  Most machines are 64 core and 2 TB of memory and running 160+ virtual machines (LPARs) on each. These are large, complex and well run machines  - all of the AIX images and VIOS are pretty well up to date with current or N -1 releases. A very pleasant surprise and impressed.  They told me that even with 2 TB of memory they tend to run out of memory before CPU cycles .  Each... [More]

Tags:  power7 wpar powersystems power6 memory aix ams ame

IBM is enhancing the AIX release and service strategy effective February 15, 2011. The key changes are: Three years of new fix support for each AIX Technology Level update (starting with AIX TL 6) One Technology Level update per AIX version per year (planned for the second half of the year) Service Packs for Technology Levels will be released about four times per year These changes reflect client requests for IBM to provide new fix support for individual Technology Level updates for a longer period. The intent is to reduce the... [More]

Tags:  aix strategy release lifecycle technology level

That was a shock - right out of the blue, we are told HACMP (OK we should call it PowerHA SystemMirror but life is too short) now supports Versioned WPARs - I had customer questions on this earlier in the week but no idea it was about to be announced. We were recommending using HACMP at the AIX 7 level and treating the WAR as a very well controlled and isolated bunch of processes, file systems etc. as a single resource. But now its much simpler. Want to know more: Techdoc

Tags:  powerha hacmp wpar power7 aix

I asked Scott about a Redbook for the new VIOS functions for Shared Storage Pools and he told me that chapters had already been added to the current PowerVM Redbooks. I almost fell of the chair!  I have been ignoring the regular Redbook update emails - but I guess I should pay more attention. So I took a look and found the Shared Storage Pools have chapters in two regular PowerVM Redbooks - note you have to download the most recent updates. IBM PowerVM Virtualization - Introduction and Configuration SG24-7940 IBM PowerVM Virtualization -... [More]

Tags:  aix powervm power7 power6 vios

This is an odd blog - it is about the withdrawal of POWER6 - which was announced in stealth mode! It has come as a shock to some customers. Given POWER7 comes with vast improvements in price performance you might say: Who cares and who would be buying POWER6 anyway?  Well some customers with long term roll-out plans, need consistent equipment for reduced complexity and reduced testing and so still want POWER6 and could get caught out. So if you care, here is my list of withdrawal dates after which you can't buy new machines (nor POWER5 to... [More]

Tags:  systems power power6

We have blogged on this really cool AIX 7 feature in the past - but here is my problem: Once I install the AIX 5.2 mksysb image in to the Workload Partition running on AIX7 it all works fine but ... then what can I show an audience to show off "AIX 5.2 running on top of AIX 7": I need a simple application that only runs on AIX 5.2 . Something simple enough that it does not take hours to install and hopefully that it is something visually interesting to see. I am told we can run Oracle 8 now including the kernel extension but its not... [More]

Tags:  aix7 power7 wpar powervm aix versioned