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

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 - +

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:  power7 memory deduplication amd redbook kindle powervm active

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

I just realised that I got help from the AIX developers to explain the output of the mpstat -d command for my POWER7 and Affinity Technical University sessions in Miami and Copenhagen that I never passed on to every one.  In an earlier blog we examined some mpstat columns but skipped others.   The nearly undocumented mpstat stats are: S0rd, S1rd, S2rd, S3rd, S4rdand S5rd. In the AIX manuals it states: S0rd = The percentage of thread re-dispatches within the scheduling affinity domain 0.  And likewise for the other numbers - but what does... [More]

Tags:  power7 cpu affinity virtual logical physical

I have been wondering why the lower end POWER7 machines have local and far memory and not local and near. Perhaps you wondered too! Well at the Miami Power Technical University, I got to talk to Dr Joel Tendler (IBMer) and a POWER7 processor guru and put the question to him. He covered this sort of architectural topic in his presentation at the event and I learnt a lot in this area by listening to the "master". Below is some background and the explanation too.   The POWER7 chips has two memory controllers for maximum performance but... [More]

Tags:  795 xyz 780 near systems aix memory 770 ab far power power7 bus local

Finally, I have the types of memory by POWER7 model double checked. I refreshed the table in part 1 but thought I should make sure every one sees the final version so I have not mislead people.  Only the Power 770/780 and Power 797 have Near memory. All the smaller machine operate a Local memory meaning on the same same POWER7 chip and Far memory for any access to another POWER7 chip's memory.    

Tags:  local power7 far virtual cpu lpar memory affinity powervm near machine

The Hypervisor makes the virtual machine (LPAR) placement decisions and changes during DLPAR. The Hypervisor is part of the Power Systems Firmware.  The POWER7 machines first arrived in the early months of 2010. Since then we have had a lot of field experience with the larger machines with large configurations with large applications and tens of thousands of processes running and in particularly the machines with all three layers of memory - which are the Power 770, Power 780 and Power 795.  From this experience, the POWER developers have... [More]

Tags:  processor power7 cpu vm entitlement powervm virtual aix lpar placement

I need you to help me settle an argument or rather lack of information. I am getting conflicting messages about whether these smaller Power7 machines use Local and Near or Local and Far memory. I documented what I thought was correct in the Part 1 of this series of blog's.   Actually, there is not much difference as these machines have two tiers of memory like "on the chip" or "some where else" so the names are hardly vital but I would like my facts straight. Unfortunately, I don't have examples of these machines with more... [More]

Tags:  730 affinity srad 740 lssrad 750 710 lpar aix power powervm 720 power7 vm

Here is another question from that larger Power 7 machine customer. They have large Virtual Machines (Logical Partitions) and can't see all the CPUs on the screen. This is made worst by Power 7 machines - not a problem with the processors or machines but there are: So many CPUs on larger machines like Power 770/780 and the mighty Power 795 Then the new Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) now means four threads per physical CPU (core). This means lots of physical CPUs and each has four logical CPUs.  So what happens on the screen - you see a... [More]

Tags:  nmon longer physical cpu power powervm aix term

I just moved our Power 5 based internal to IBM Wiki Webserver to Power 6 p570 which was recently freed up now that we (Advanced Technical Support, EMEA) are mainly working on the Power 7 machines. The Power 6 machine are still very useful for testing beta copies of new software like AIX and the end of year VIOS functions but some features are Power 7 dependent. We are removing the Power 5 machines because we are moving building and to a much smaller computer room and have to move from 15 racks down to 5 racks. We have been a little lazy in... [More]

Tags:  vios 6 storwize asmi power7 upgrade apache power aix webserver