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:  powervm nmon term power aix cpu longer physical

Just completed the move of the POWER and AIX Hands-on Movies to YouTube videos - after pruning we have 97 of them. This means you can watch them on your mobile Smartphone and Tablets in addition to your workstation/personal computer. You can find them all here:   YouTube  look for my "Nigel Griffiths" Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/nigelargriffiths This should mean they are simpler to find, search for and view.   During the transfer I pruned out a few of the older ones particular Systems 6.2 as we now have a set of Systems... [More]

Tags:  aix powersc youtube vidoes systems powervm director power

Time to correct a few assumptions and statements that I made a while back.   Previously I said the POWER Hypervisor decides where to put a Virtual Machine (VM/LPAR) based on the Virtual Processor number (spreading factor). Well, apart from it nearly being right ... I was actually wrong! I got talking to one of these very impressive Hypervisor developers in Germany and he put me right.  In most of my larger machines, I do what I think is fairly normal for creating an VM - like working with a CPU core to RAM ratio that my customers use, like 1... [More]

Tags:  chips srad lssrad cores cpu power7 aix affinity core

Shared Storage Pools is the next big thing to owed systems admin time and boost flexibility  for Power Systems, PowerVM and controlling SAN disks from the VIOS and HMC.  I will not go on about SSP here but I particular like the fact Live Partition Mobility even with SAN disks is ready to go with SSP and there is no need to reZone the SAN disks.   To start using the new and improved SSP, you need the latest Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) - the version name is a nightmare! Who ever thought VIOS 2.2.1.3 FP25 SP01 with iFix was a sensible name for a... [More]

Tags:  powervm vios aix power7 power6

So you have Discovered, given Access and run Inventory on your HMC and it is not finding the Servers and Virtual Servers that the HMC is connected too! What do you do next? Well here are a series of suggestions for you to try (this is not an official diagnostics path but might help you out): How much memory has your HMC got? I get people trying to use old HMCs and the original ones had just 1 GB of memory. This is basically not enough these days - in my humble opinion - unless you have just one machine! But how do you find out what you have?... [More]

Tags:  power7 hmc powervm aix power6 director systems

  I got another WPAR question today: From the Global AIX, I can add a filesystem to /wpars/WPARname/directory so the WPAR has access but what if I don't want to have the filesystem mounted there in the Global AIX?   For example: I have a Global AIX filesystem called /tools that I want to mount in to one or many WPARs and appear and /temp in the WPAR(s)?   My first answer is well you can use NFS because I do that all the time and I am a heavy user of NFS - no jokes please. I use NFS heavily!  If the NFS server exports the mount point for every... [More]

Tags:  partition global workload wpar aix aix6 power7 sharing - filesystem

The title should read "Local, Near & Far ..."  - I will not correct it or links might fail.  With a shared processor virtual machine (I am calling this "VM" but was called LPAR!) there are various suggestions of setting Entitlement ("Desired processing units" on the LPAR profile on the HMC, I am calling this "E") and Virtual Processor numbers (I am calling this "VP"). For Capped, the Entitlement is the maximum guaranteed CPU time that you can't go over and you round up the Entitlement to the... [More]

Tags:  powervm entitlement aix low processor virtual power6 power7

I am working with a larger Power 7 customer and learning lots about life in the large and professional computer room. Oh Gosh!!! My Power Virtual Machine (Logical Partition) is totally busy. Oh Heck!!! Look at all that System time, we have a serious problem!! Or do we? Take a look at the below nmon stats and make up your own mind before scrolling down.         Actually, we are in offices many miles away from most of the Power 7 computers because the machines are split across three sites.  More than twenty Power 7 Model 795's is enough to... [More]

Tags:  performance system power aix nmon tl05 time tl06

 We have all probably seen or used the topas CEC on-screen view (topas -C command). This is started while logged into one AIX Virtual Server (LPAR) and shows all the other AIX or VIOS (as it is based on AIX) Virtual Servers of a single Power Server. Here is a reminder - this is on-line, on-screen and updated every 10 seconds or so:    Here my Virtual Servers are called purple<something> and below the top machine summary we have a line for each Virtual Server and stats like AIX release, memory use, CPU stats (PhysB is the Physical CPU time... [More]

Tags:  power7 virtual systems server performance aix monitoring power lpar topas

I have just released a second VIOS Shares Storage Pools movie that you may like to go and watch. We now have two movies covering first an Introduction (the new movie) and then second movie covering a hands-on look at setting it up and running it. There are also the example commands and the Info and download links. I am really liking the Shared Storage Pools simple operation, disk space saving and flexibility. I currently have just a tiny 40GB pool out of which I am running 6 Client Virtual Machine which each think that have 16 GBs. That is 96... [More]

Tags:  virtualization vios power6 virtualisation aix systems power7 power

I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it.  Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone".   Really dumb "nmon has stopped... [More]

Tags:  nmon2web power7 aix firmware analyser service cpu nmon packs nmon2rrd

I asked Scott about a Redbook for the new VIOS functions for Shared Storage Pools and he told me that chapters had already been added to the current PowerVM Redbooks. I almost fell of the chair!  I have been ignoring the regular Redbook update emails - but I guess I should pay more attention. So I took a look and found the Shared Storage Pools have chapters in two regular PowerVM Redbooks - note you have to download the most recent updates. IBM PowerVM Virtualization - Introduction and Configuration SG24-7940 IBM PowerVM Virtualization -... [More]

Tags:  aix powervm vios power6 power7

I was asked at the Technical University: How can we tell (in a script) if we are running in a WPAR or a regular AIX? We also called it the Global AIX, if its running WPARs.  It took me a good few minutes to find out how to do it and thought I would shared it to save you time: Use: uname -W It returns 0 for the Global AIX and a regular AIX or if it is in a WPAR it returns the WPAR Number (i.e. non-zero) Below we show how to use this in a script. wparno=`uname -W` if (( $wparno == "0" )) then         echo Global AIX else         echo... [More]

Tags:  aix wpar global

We have had the Global Services offering "Performance Management for AIX" server for years (even decades) - it gets shorten to "PM for AIX" or "PM for Power Systems" which sounds like a "Prime Minister for the Electricity Board" to English people!  Anyway, briefly this offers: PM collects local AIX stats and configuration details, then sends the information to IBM over a secure Internet link to be analysed. The results includes performance graphs, performance trends, config reports and warnings about... [More]

Tags:  pm aix topas 6.1 performance smitty management tl06 recording