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 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]

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]

Yes this is still the AIX pert Blog but my beautiful POWER8 machines can also run that "odd ball" operating system now called IBM i. That should generate some comments :-)   We have a project to install IBM i 7.2 and then adopt it into PowerVC for Capture and Deploy. This feature is in beta test and selected customers allowed to give it ago. It is planned for full release later this year (that is not an IBM promise). If you are interested in testing PowerVC with IBM i visit:... [More]

We have the new HMC 8.1 code stream to manage the POWER8 machines. It also manages the POWER6 and POWER7 machines but not POWER5.  I find the HMC Virtual Storage Management panel very useful and saves me time for assigning Shared Storage Pool (SSP) space to virtual machines (VM's) and automatically doing this for Dual VIO Servers without having to log-on to the VIOS servers at all.  It is also good for assigning virtual DVDs to VMs to boot and install the various operating systems, AIX, RHEL, SLES, Fedora, Debian, etc.... [More]

I "borrowed" this from Jay Kruemcke' slide deck but it is important information for all to know

RHEL (6.4 and 6.5) Servers show their PC heritage when you assign server style static IP addresses instead of home network DHCP controlled IP networks. [[That will generate a few comments!!]] I find the /etc/resolv.conf file gets modified after a reboot and so DNS fails - this is a broken as designed feature. I would enjoy someone trying to defend this feature and why it does this for my benefit!  [[That will generate a even more comments!!]] RANT ON I search the network and the comments are the "NetworkManager" is doing this -... [More]

Many people in computing, we seem fixated on "percentages" when talking about CPU use - We need to fix that. When a computer has an absolutely fixed number of CPUs on the time scale of a few years the percentages of the box makes a lot of sense. But in a virtualised world we will have to change. For 10 years, we can do Dynamic CPU changes to a LPAR (Virtual Machine). Yesterdays 40% used is today's 80% because the admin guy  added a couple of CPUs over night. If we look at the percentages and see a massive jump and hit the... [More]