I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it.  Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone".   Really dumb "nmon has stopped... [More]

Etiquetas:  cpu service analyser packs aix nmon nmon2web nmon2rrd power7 firmware

Well, I'm back from a 2.5 week holiday and there is a heap of topics that have built up in that time. My email is very full of things I need to share so expect a blog per day for a while.   My friend for the last couple of decades Michael Perzl in Germany has been very busy in the last month or two. Lots of people that are using AIX every day also want to make use of the popular open source packages. Some of these come as part of AIX (or on extension packs for legal reasons) like Perl, ssh and the basic IBM HTTP server (Apache) part of WAS.... [More]

I highly recommend the AIX Virtual User Group run by Joe Armstrong that roughly has a hot topic Webinar session once a month. Typically, there is 300 to 700 online to the session, many include a demo and there are Slides and Replay downloadable if you miss one or look back over the previous 70 or more sessions and want an update. On the larger hot topics there are lots of questions and answers handled during the session.  Officially, it is called the USA AIX Virtual User group but they take registrations from around the world but schedule for... [More]

Etiquetas:  aix power user groups - virtual powervm

So I got asked, just as an example configuration which forces lots of workload per CPU: Given a 16 CPU POWER machine and a need to run 100 workloads, would I recommend 100 LPARs or 100 WPARs? In case you are not familiar with POWER technology: LPAR = Logical Partition used the PowerVM to split CPU, memory and I/O across multiple virtual machines (also called virtual servers). The I/O is handles by a special purpose LPAR called the Virtual I/O Server, which provides virtual network, virtual disks, virtual optical and virtual tape.  Each LPAR has... [More]

Etiquetas:  aix7 power7 wpar workload lpar powervm vios

Earlier today I received email from a customer reporting their large POWER7 based machines where on firmware 720_64 to 720_90 and their reluctance to take the outage to upgrade it. They were asking for fine details of newer firmware levels and what advantages this would bring to " justify the outage to their user departments ".   To be blunt this is a horror story: I lay awake at night in a cold sweat about stories like this. The customer has the whole "running computers plan upside down".  The question should be " can... [More]

Etiquetas:  system power power795 dashboard aix power7 power770 hacmp mirror firmware power780 lpm

  I got another WPAR question today: From the Global AIX, I can add a filesystem to /wpars/WPARname/directory so the WPAR has access but what if I don't want to have the filesystem mounted there in the Global AIX?   For example: I have a Global AIX filesystem called /tools that I want to mount in to one or many WPARs and appear and /temp in the WPAR(s)?   My first answer is well you can use NFS because I do that all the time and I am a heavy user of NFS - no jokes please. I use NFS heavily!  If the NFS server exports the mount point for every... [More]

Etiquetas:  - filesystem aix global workload sharing wpar partition power7 aix6

This week I spent 4 hours with a customer covering many advanced WPAR topics and took way a bunch of questions that I had to check the answers and ask the WPAR developers themselves to be sure I had the right answers. If the questions were not clear to my customers and I did know initially know the answers then there may be others with similar issues so I thought I would share the answers with everyone.   1) Workload Partitions - What is the road map? Well, I am not going to make announcements on a blog for sure. If you are new to WPAR, I can... [More]

Etiquetas:  power6 workload power7 wpar aix partition powervm

Recently, I delivered a 7.5 hour Systems Director 6.3 Instructor lead demo at IBM Zurich - that gives us 25 more people ready to dive into using it.  It is a very polished building and the IBM Forum is amazing and they even have IBM food :-)  I had to take a second mortgage out on my house to pay for the taxi to the airport (fortunately they take a credit card) and I thought Norway was expensive until now!      Anyway, when I got back to the UK, I decided to perform the Systems Director 6.3 to 6.3.1 update.  You get Systems Director to update... [More]

Etiquetas:  6.3.1 director managment aix power power7 atkupd575e systems

It was my birthday on Saturday and by pure luck my Raspberry Pi was delivered the day before - what a great day "hacking" (in the old sense of the word). I have been waiting for a few months for this delivery - What a treat!!  If you have not heard of this credit size computer before here is the back ground.   The Problem In the UK, school information technology education has been pitifully reduced to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My own kids came home badly depressed as they started the classes as they knew far more than the... [More]

Etiquetas:  ams nweb aix power7 ame power amd wpar nmon aixpert itm isd rbac raspberry ssd ganglia dlpar pi charm ssp

Systems Director 6.3.1 is available   This includes a fix I needed. On a completely fresh install the Update Manager will not work with the NIM server for AIX updates due to a bug that forgets to create /export/um_lpp_source on the NIM server - oops!   Fixed with: /usr/sbin/crfs -v jfs2 -g rootvg -m  /export/um_lpp_source -a size=1G But make sure it mounts by default on AIX reboot.   Find the What's New for 6.3.1   Install the new ISD 6.3.1 update and lots of fixes - you get Systems Director to do upgrade as normal

Etiquetas:  systems director 6.3.1

Warning: touchy feely comment coming up! I have always found it odd that IBM markets the Hardware = POWER7 a lot and very little marketing on the Operating System = AIX7.    Personally, I have more good feelings and positive vibes for AIX operating system because I log in to every day and use it for hours than I do for the POWER hardware running it. I very rarely go to the machine room and hug the machine!   Does anyone else feel this way or am I sadly alone? Put it another way would you spend two Dollar Euro Pounds (all increasingly ... [More]

Etiquetas:  touchy feely aix7 aix person power7 comment

I have been touring cities in Europe: Birmingham for the 4 day Technical University, Manchester, central London and Dublin for the Ask the Experts 1  day event and last week Copenhagen for a POWER & AIX User group Technical Event.  I have had about 250 to 300 people in my sessions and asked every time - How knows about the AIX Virtual User Group and only had about 30 people put their hands up.   I am amazed how few people have found this invaluable resource. The organiser, Joe Armstrong an IBMer, set-ups up roughly monthly world wide... [More]

Etiquetas:  user virtual sessions aix group replays

It has been a busy fortnight and I just realised I have micro-blogged (Twitter) comments and link but neglected this AIXpert Blog - sorry about that.  Here is a summary and a lot more thoughts that Twitter allows. I actually like the discipline of the Twitter 140 characters as if forces you to get to the point!    Firefox First, I have upgraded to Firefox 10 Enterprise from 3.6 - I was having multiple problems with the older release that had previously seemed to be the only safe one for using both HMC and IBM Systems Director.  In particular,... [More]

Etiquetas:  power7 pure systems power powervm sdmc

 I may have written about these in previous blogs but these have been updated and added too them. They are in my regular Systems Director presentation but I thought they should be shared to a wider audience - no sense is sitting on good information.  These are very much my thoughts and opinions for POWER and mostly AIX systems. These are not official IBM statements.   1) Quick Introduction . If you want a 12 minute look at how Systems Director can benefit Power and AIX system administrators in eight ways then watch my 12 minute movie. After... [More]

Etiquetas:  systems aix director & links power tips