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]

Tags:  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]

Tags:  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]

Tags:  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]

Tags:  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]

Tags:  shared powervm storage aix7 good 2 up and running vios information power7 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]

Tags:  systems hmc hypervisor firmware 795 power7 power 780 770

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]

Tags:  nmon aix weighted power analyzer average analyser

Seasonal Greeting. My family decided to give me a Kindle e-book - Wow! So after the usual experiments with reading a book, playing with the web browser via WiFi, I then thought; Could this help me at work too!  So reading up I noted it fully supports PDF format files and the IBM Redbooks come in PDF. So a quick download over USB cable and I can read them easily enough in landscape mode. As part of Advanced Technical Support, I am expected to "know everything" and over the past 10 years I have read all the POWER4, 5, 6, 7 machine... [More]

Tags:  memory power7 deduplication amd kindle redbook powervm active

The below URL takes you to the top of the Systems Director 6.3 online documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/director/pubs/topic/com.ibm.director.main.helps.doc/fqm0_main.html As a rule I use Firefox 3.6.24 all the time for my browsing as it works well for Systems Director and Hardware Management Console (HMC). Later Firefox versions have "variable" results which re frustrating and that just slow me down. The Firefox developer when mad and got to version 8 suddenly over what appeared to be a few weeks but have realised... [More]

Tags:  director systems firefox 3.6 infocenter docs 6.3

So a long download of about 7 hours for the 1.9 GB but a reasonably quick install.  Fresh AIX 6.1 TL6 and service pack 6 installed.  See my Update below for a problem with this AIX level. Prepared a /database filesystem for the DB2 database. The Pre-Install Utility told me to fix some file system sizes, more paging space and ulimit - good stuff. The Installer worked fine. The CIM Server install seems to take for ages at the start!  It then refreshes the Common Agent, installed the default "managed" DB2 database invisibly behind the... [More]

Tags:  aix on install systems 6.3 power director power7

IBM Systems Director 6.3 Arrives Early Yes, you read that right - it arrived earlier than the date in the IBM Announcement - a free to use unexpected Xmas present from IBM. I have never heard of an early delivery before - perhaps I am getting to old and cynical :-)   The Base Server download for AIX is a larger 1.9 GB file (was 1.3 GB for 6.2) but that includes includes AEM,VMControl (and Service and support manager but we probably don't need that as we have the function in Power Systems via the HMC).  They all get installed in one go but you... [More]

Tags:  systems director arrives aix early ibm download 6.3 power power7

 At the Miami and Copenhagen Power Systems Technical Universities, I covered what we knew about the next release of Systems Director (6.3) planned for 16th December 2011.    One of the hot topics was High Availability using disk replication for the embedded DB2 database for active:passive fail-over.  It turns out this feature is not  included with Systems Director 6.3 release - sorry about that.   The good news, at least, is that this feature is in development and working for the next release of SDMC, which is based on Systems Director 6.3... [More]

Tags:  systems availability director 6.3 high

Below is from your Power Systems, Advanced Technical Support team in Europe (EMEA) with lots of input from many people.   We find many people are over optimistic and making assumptions - which can catch them out - we learnt the hard way too.   Don't Assume 1 - The same boost as last time It may be that you migrated from 2Mit to 10Mbit and saw approximately a 5 fold increase in performance. Similarly when you went from 10Mbit to 100Mbit, and from 100Mbit to 1Gbit; you saw approximately a 10 fold improvement. Don't assume that... [More]

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Active Memory Deduplication was announcement on 12th October and available on 14th October but there has been a little confusion on: what you need,  how you install it and run it and how it works?  This blog will attempt to demystify this interesting new Power Systems feature.  This is one of many features to reduce the memory foot print and so reduce costs for POWER and AIX logical partitions. So far we have: Workload Partitions - reduce the memory used by many copies of AIX to just one Global copy and applications installed at the Global... [More]