I am writing this blog because I tried to do this, got confused by the documentation and completely failed at first! However, I persisted and finally got it working and want to save you the frustration and wasted time.   I assume you have a regular POWER8 Power Server running PowerVM and dual VIOS. Mine is a S824 with latest in March 2017 firmware (860) and HMC (860) but the problems don't related to these levels.               In true "cookbook" style follow me as I get it working: 1)... [More]

UPDATE: The Official IBM VIOS 2.2.5 Shared Storage Pools (Phase 6) New Features Announcement arrives three weeks after GA but better late than never, right! You can find it at this URL:   VIOS Shared Storage Pools (Phase 6) Announcement   = the Official Version   My Summary of the Important Features Available with VIOS 2.2.5 – Generally Available 11 th Nov 2016 1.  SSP VIOS nodes from 16 to 24   – a normally 12 dual VIOS servers 2.  Fully support the DeveloperWorks SSP Disaster... [More]

Well it is still early days for this new machine (week 5 from General Availability and there was Xmas in the middle) and I get distracted but concurrently running lots of projects.  In this AIXpert Blog entry I am to make some comments on the S812LC OpenPOWER machine regarding Updating Firmware and then Getting the Front Disk Bays working with the simpler RAID Controller (Feature code EC3Y but I am sure the other fancy RAID Controller would be much the same but with fancier RIAD options like RAID5).   The development... [More]

UPDATE: This method has been superseded by the HMC REST API for Energy (Watts and Celsius) Follow this link to my AIXPert Blog for the details Click this link:   POWER8 Watts, Temp, SSP I/O & Server/LPAR stats from HMC REST API - Version 3 With worked examples in using Python to extract the data and graph it or generate CSV files.   I was asked how to get the inlet and exhaust temperature from a POWER8 machine and the amount of electricity it is... [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]

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]

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]

I regularly get asked a question like: I have 4 months of data from 25 machines and have to develop a Capacity Planning model to size these LPARs on to new machines but I am having problems with having so much data. What can you recommend?  We need graphs of CPU compared to Entitlement CPU Physical CPU use Maximum real memory use Network MB/s Disk MB/s Disk IOPS Sometimes this data is needed as input in to the Workload Estimator tool or Server Consolidation tools. My standard response is: You now understand Performance Monitoring and... [More]

Tags:  rrdtool nmon2rrd planning analyser linux capacity nmon2web aix nmon

Our Advanced Technology Support, Europe team have had a few months secretly testing the Power 750/760 internally to IBM as part of the normal Early Ship Program which lets a few machine out of the development labs to be tested by others to gain feedback on the product, documentation, features and usability. I thought others would like to see a few pictures of the team and the equipment involved. Please note: This is an Early Ship Machine, so there are a few details like stickers and handle colours that may differ slightly from the final product... [More]

Tags:  power7 ibmi power7+ power760 power750 aix