Fourteen new movies/Video's on System Director on YouTube I have just last week uploaded 14 new System Director movies that were previously a whole day Technical University session and I thought it a good idea to share these with every body. It comes to about 4 hours in total and it a mixture of sizes from 7 minutes to 29 minutes. The focus is on core Systems Director function rather than advanced function plug-ins. It worries me a little that we often try to talk about and sell Systems Director for the advanced stuff but you really need to get... [More]

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Hi, Rob McNelly, the esteemed POWER7 Champion, sent me a really good questions and I thought would make a good blog as I get asked this about once a month. I have cut down the questions a but but it is a two parts: His customer is thinking about putting Systems Director on to their NIM server. Rob remembered me commenting on this but wants the details. They are planning to give it 1 dedicated Power7 core and 12G memory. What do I think about that?   Answer 1: 2 years ago this combination (NIM & ISD) was not allowed ( I think it was just not... [More]

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  The new  VIOS Shared Storage Pools 3 (SSP3) arrived a month ago and I have all my VIOS updated now to VIOS 2.2.2.1 plus fixes. This brings with it the regular VIOS improvements but also new features for SSP3 including: Better pool use stats for example see the below lssp command and the Used percentage and Unused(mb) columns and the over view output too has new data $ lssp -clustername stars -sp atlantic -bd Lu Name     Size(mb) ProvisionType %Used Unused(mb) Lu Udid orange7a    32768    THIN             9% 29615        7d58538152 …... [More]

Tags:  director 3 pools powervm shared power7 6.3.2 systems storage

At a recent POWER & AIX Workshop, I was challenged when I stated that you can download IBM Systems Director (ISD) and run it at no costs. Granted: If you want IBM Support for ISD functions then you do need to purchase the license and SWMA for every endpoint (think HMC and every core of any machine that ISD is controlling).  Compared to other systems management tools (I have worked with in the past) the ISD prices are very low so its worth asking for the local currency price.  I also think most people (including myself) will get stuck on... [More]

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It has bee a long few weeks traveling to Dublin, Las Vegas, Slovenia, Germany and Sweden to give lots of presentations.  Six Weeks and five countries and the expenses are piling up on my desk. I was presenting a core set of topics like POWER7+ announcement summary, VIOS Shared Storage Pools (SSP3), Workload Partitions (WPAR) and Versioned WPARs to run AIX 5.2 and AIX 5.3, quick introduction to PowerSC (security tools), a Techie "what you need to know about" Systems Director for AIX, and Quick Dips in to Active Memory Deduplication... [More]

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  I suddenly could not get AIX updates to work via my NIM server. The problem number DNZPAX075E just means the NIM command failed for unknown reasons. Not very helpful when you have a ISD Server, NIM Server and a Target AIX Server and the problem could be anywhere.  I looked around and found a few other people were stuck on this one.  So now I worked it out - with the help excellent help of systems Director support. 1) Restart the Systems Director Server and the NIM Server - just good house keeping and check you have free disk space in the... [More]

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This is part 2 of Systems Director licensing or at least working out what you are doing with System Director that requires a license. In part 1, we looked at listing (via the command line) the POWER machines that Systems Director was connected too.   This time we what to find out the machines that Active Energy Manager (AEM) is controlling. Once you have installed AEM it is tempting to start monitoring and controlling all your Power Systems electrical use and temperatures but you should only use AEM if you have a license for AEM for each... [More]

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I have long thought it is rather silly that IBM Systems Director can't give you a list the licenses that you should have! It does, after all, know what machines it is controlling and the data is in the database.  Perhaps, that will come in the future.  What can we do in the short term? Generally, I like to do everything from the graphical user interface (GUI) . I have not got time to learn and use both GUI and CLI. The system configuration data can be extracted using the command line interface (CLI) on the Systems Director server, so I spent... [More]

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Recently, I delivered a 7.5 hour Systems Director 6.3 Instructor lead demo at IBM Zurich - that gives us 25 more people ready to dive into using it.  It is a very polished building and the IBM Forum is amazing and they even have IBM food :-)  I had to take a second mortgage out on my house to pay for the taxi to the airport (fortunately they take a credit card) and I thought Norway was expensive until now!      Anyway, when I got back to the UK, I decided to perform the Systems Director 6.3 to 6.3.1 update.  You get Systems Director to update... [More]

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Systems Director 6.3.1 is available   This includes a fix I needed. On a completely fresh install the Update Manager will not work with the NIM server for AIX updates due to a bug that forgets to create /export/um_lpp_source on the NIM server - oops!   Fixed with: /usr/sbin/crfs -v jfs2 -g rootvg -m  /export/um_lpp_source -a size=1G But make sure it mounts by default on AIX reboot.   Find the What's New for 6.3.1   Install the new ISD 6.3.1 update and lots of fixes - you get Systems Director to do upgrade as normal

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 I may have written about these in previous blogs but these have been updated and added too them. They are in my regular Systems Director presentation but I thought they should be shared to a wider audience - no sense is sitting on good information.  These are very much my thoughts and opinions for POWER and mostly AIX systems. These are not official IBM statements.   1) Quick Introduction . If you want a 12 minute look at how Systems Director can benefit Power and AIX system administrators in eight ways then watch my 12 minute movie. After... [More]

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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]

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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]

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The below URL takes you to the top of the Systems Director 6.3 online documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/director/pubs/topic/com.ibm.director.main.helps.doc/fqm0_main.html As a rule I use Firefox 3.6.24 all the time for my browsing as it works well for Systems Director and Hardware Management Console (HMC). Later Firefox versions have "variable" results which re frustrating and that just slow me down. The Firefox developer when mad and got to version 8 suddenly over what appeared to be a few weeks but have realised... [More]

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