Upon reading through the release notes for Fix Pack 22 for VIOS 2.1 , I stumbled across a new command called chkdev . According to the notes, this command was “ added to help you check devices for virtual provisioning capability ”. This fired my curiosity and as soon as I had applied FP22 to one of my VIOS, I started using this command to see what it could do for me!    First, I checked the man page for chkdev . It stated that chkdev can determine whether or not a device can be used in physical to virtual (p2v) migration on a VIOS.   chkdev... [More]

I stumbled across this IBM support tech note today. It relates to controlling which network to use during a Live Partition Mobility operation.   http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg3T7000117&myns=phw&mynp=OCHW182&mync=E   By being given the choice of which network to use we can select network adapters that are more suited to this type of activity i.e. ones that are one or more of the following:  high-speed, under utilized and/or dedicated to non-application data (for example). Using a “high speed” network may... [More]

Recently a colleague contacted me with a question relating to hostname resolution and DNS on AIX 6.1. I thought it was an interesting discussion so I thought I’d share it with you here.   His question was basically this:   “I n AIX 6.1, as you know, the resolv.conf has some additional options. Do you know what would happen if I have two nameservers in my file and the target hostname isn't found, will the second nameserver necessarily be looked up? The man page says:   If more than one name server is listed, the resolver routines query... [More]