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 sessions virtual group aix 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

Many countries switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST) next weekend March 25th - unfortunately you may need to apply a fix to AIX 6 and AIX 7 before the change or programs can get inconsistent time from various time function and systems calls.  This could have a major impact on many tools, for example, make, logs and databases ... well just about anything that uses a time value.   There was an earlier temporary fix available but now there is a fully details final fix. Please got to the bellow website for all the details :... [More]

Etiquetas:  efix 6 posix reboot fix & day dst light olson time aix saving 7

As part of my moving computer room project,  I had to change the IP address of my Systems Director server. I recall a long time ago there were issues in this area for (I think) ISD 6.1, so I was not looking forward to this change.  Just for a change, I thought I would check the documentation first :-)  Once I found the 6.3 part of the documentation there was a whole page on how to do this IP address change. It turns out to be very simple on ISD 6.3. Stop Systems Director with: smstop Change the IP address and DNS server, of course, to match.... [More]

Etiquetas:  ip change on director systems aix power7 powervm address 6.3

We have all heard the old story of a computer company that was so successful that is had to move to smaller premises! The point being that they upgraded the computers to much smaller but more powerful ones and did not need the floor space.  Well, it is happening to me!  My Advanced Technical Support group are moving from IBM Bedfont Lakes (near Heathrow), UK from building 2 to building 3. That might not sound like much and it is only a stones throw away but we are going from 10 racks down to 3 racks. The old POWER5 machines that were not... [More]

Etiquetas:  powervm v7000 server power7 aix consolidation storwize

Hi, I just release a fifth hands-on movie this month and on this interesting topic. You can find the movie here:  Shared Storage Pools 2 - Thin provisioning, monitoring free space + Alerts     Shared Storage Pool Thin provisioning is pretty cool and saves a lot of disk space . Effectively the 100's of GBs of unused disks space in 100's of Virtual Machines (LPARs) are bought together in one place in the Shared Storage Pool and then can be used for real.  All this without the use of clever disk subsystems.  The risk is that you use all the disk... [More]

Etiquetas:  monitoring power7 space vios powervm thin provisioning and alerts free aix

In case you missed the announcements, I have released four new movies this week:   Shared Storage Pools phase 2 - Getting Started - movie 101   Active Memory Deduplication Theory - movie 102   Active System Optimizer - movie 103   System Director 6.3 First Use - movie 104  Catch them all at the home of POWER6, POWER7, PowerVM, Systems Director and AIX Movies - or save this link for 21 hours of intensive techie learning - http://tinyurl.com/AIXmovies   ps: The previous movie last month about installing Systems Director 6.3 on AIX is a good movie... [More]

Etiquetas:  director active optiimizer deduplication memory power7 powervm systems aix

At last I have got round to rebuilding my Shared Storage Pool cluster of machines. We have the four VIOS limit. So I was thinking: For machines with Dual Virtual I/O Servers - the options are limited so I would pair up machines for mutual Live Partition Mobility. For machines with single VIOSs - I would create a cluster of four machines for some extra flexibility and LPM across any of the machines.   The "cluster -create" command to make the first node of the cluster too about 3 minutes and the "cluster -addnode" command... [More]

Etiquetas:  powervm shared storage aix7 2 good and up vios running power7 information pools some - +

As we all know, the advanced PowerVM virtualisation functions of POWER7 based machines are implemented in the hardware (the POWER7 processor itself and the System Firmware, which includes PowerVM Hypervisor) for increased security, high performance and reliability.  After more than a year of POWER7 field experience and fixes to increase RAS, further development of still more virtualisation functions and improved algorithms for higher performance - it is very important for all of us to install the newer levels of System firmware to avoid already... [More]

Etiquetas:  systems hmc firmware hypervisor 795 power7 power 770 780

I have been running the nmon ( n igel's mon itor) for AIX project for 15 years now but I am still learning.   I initially wrote it to help me run AIX 3.2 then AIX 4 benchmarks on RS/6000 machines as running the older "down the screen" and "line by line" tools like vmstat and iostat was driving me mad (literally making my eye hurt) and so using screen curses enabled the number to stop moving on the screen.  nmon's second most important feature was to make graphing the results simpler as a graph includes the time dimension, it... [More]

Etiquetas:  nmon aix weighted power analyzer average analyser

I spent two days with a "well known brand" UK retailer trying out Versioned Workload Partitions (vWPAR).  Actually, it was with an IBM Business Partner that runs the machines for them- two knowledgeable and fun guys to work with - we were asked by the European manager in the next room to keep the noise down! This Versioned WPAR technology lets you run AIX 5.2 or AIX 5.3 inside an AIX 7 on Power7 Workload Partition (WPAR). You simply get the source AIX up to the required level (which you should already by running), then take a mksysb... [More]

Etiquetas:  versioned partition workload aix aix7 powervm wpar 5.3 power7