OpenStack is a fast moving open source project and rapidly adding new features. It is actually very impressive how they have so many interrelated projects (one or more for every sub-system lets call it 60) and still manage to coordinate regular testing and releases every six months.  This is of course, primarily, designed for running virtual machines in "cattle mode" = lots of them, they are all the same and if one gets sick then shot it in the head and make another one. PowerVC then takes the official newly released OpenStack... [More]

This Blog is brought to you by Clive Benjamin (Principal Engineer) who worked out how to do it. If your HMC has a quality high resolution local screen or KVM screen then the Restricted Shell terminal window font size is far too small to read and the font used very narrow lines - in our humble opinion . This blog shows you how to fix this and "no", the obvious window Font Size option does not work. 1) Below: On the HMC start the Restricted Shell window 2) Below: With the cursor on the terminal window used Control + Right mouse button... [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]

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]

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]

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

This blog also applies to Power Servers running Linux on Power native on the machine. While you can perform a text based Linux install on the dumb console terminal emulator (see previous AIXpert Blog about the serial cable that you need and the software) as a challenge to survive the Tab navigation, space selection, sometimes the cursor works and occasional Function Key show stopper (SUSE SLES 11) - I would recommend a VNC install. First, you can get back to your desk to run VNC viewer client to complete the install and not stand in the noisy... [More]

I regularly get asked to run a demonstration for IBM Systems Director but that is a time consuming business for both me and the audience. Especially,  when you can find out every thing that I know from the comfort of you own office or even home office plus Stop, Replay and Pause via YouTube videos. So here is a reminder and hopefully a page I can point to when I next gets asked.   Topic Title YouTube Minutes 1 ISD63 Workshop 1 Techie Intro v2 Link 42 2 ISD63 Workshop 2 Quick Look v2 Link 16 3 ISD63 Workshop 3 Install v2 Link 18 4... [More]

The latest Versioned Workload Partition (VWPAR) Version 1.1.2 is available but largely secret! With this update I get on my AIX 7 virtual machine,  in which I have installed both AIX5.2 and AIX 5.3 support: # lslpp -L | grep -i vwpar vwpar.52.rte 1.1.0.0 C F AIX 5.2 Versioned WPAR Runtime vwpar.images.52 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR 5.2 Support vwpar.images.53 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR 5.3 Support vwpar.images.base 1.1.2.0 C F Versioned WPAR... [More]

The answer is "it depends" and there is no Rule Of Thumb - IMHO. The 2 times ROT is very old school and for small servers where peaks could really run out of RAM fast and hurt. The worst I saw was 6 times but that was OS guys and RDBMS guys and app guys all said  2 times ... each!!  and then the System Admin guy just added them up not realising it was the same 2 times!  Basically, bonkers and they used 2% in the end. With machines with large memory, say starting at 64 GB, the memory demand peaks will not go too high nor... [More]

When you install Linux on an IBM POWER processor machine (Red Hat, SUSE or now includes Fedora), you then need to add the IBM supplied additional RPM packages. These give you a whole bunch of useful tools like HMC comms so you can Dynamic LPAR change and LPM, diagnostic tools, and configuration listing commands. Plus more importantly nmon :-)   The repository allows you to update your packages as new versions become available and to benefit from fixes and additional functions.  Without these you don't get the full Power... [More]

The fifth POWER Ask the Experts is a one day customer technical event in the UK which ran in Manchester and London on 15th/16th July 2013. It proved to be a very popular free event.  We had well over a 100 people attend which was a mixture of customers, a few Business partners and some IBMers. Agenda 10:00  - Power Systems Update - Pat O'Rourke: Austin Briefing Centre, USA   Download 22MB .pdf 11:15  - Performance Best Practices with POWER7 - Nigel Griffiths, ATS Europe  Download 3.5MB .pdf... [More]

I have tried to get permission to pass on these numbers publically but got no answer at all.  As these are facts rather than opinions, I see no harm in them. So I will work on the old theory: "it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" ... here goes. The AIX Virtual User Group often asks a few questions as part of the registration process for the next webinar session and it generates fascinating statistics from real POWER and AIX users. Observations: The people that join the AIX Virtual User Group are well above the... [More]