Backing up your VIOS configuration with viosbr.
After applying Fix Pack to my VIOS 2.1 server, I thought I’d try out the new viosbr command. $ ioslevel 2.1.2.10-FP-22 The man page for viosbr states that this command can be used to backup and restore the virtual I/O server configuration. $ man viosbr viosbr command Purpose Performs the operations for backing up the virtual and logical configuration, listing the configuration, and restoring the configuration of the Virtual I/O Server. The viosbr command can be run only by the padmin user. ….. First I attempted the... [More]
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VIOS 2.1 FP22 and VMLibrary.
Last month I applied the latest
fix pack for VIOS 2.1 i.e. FP22, to one of our lab VIOS. I came across the following
error while doing so: Renaming Media Repository Logical Volume: VMLibrary_LV --> VMLibrary umount: error unmounting /dev/VMLibrary_LV:
Device busy Media Repository failed to unmount. We
cannot continue until it can be successfully unmounted.
Please address and retry. update: Failed while executing the ios.cli.rte.post_u script. installp: The installation has FAILED for the "root" part of... [More]
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The new chkdev command for VIOS 2.1.
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]
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Setting Up A Network To Improve Live Partition Mobility Performance
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]
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AIX 6.1 resolv.conf and netcd.
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]
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Paging Device Considerations for AMS ( Active Memory Sharing ) with LPM ( Live Partition Mobility).
What are the considerations for paging devices when using Active Memory Sharing (AMS) with Live Partition Mobility (LPM)? Paging devices can only be assigned to one shared memory pool at a time. You cannot assign the same paging device to a shared memory pool on more than one system at the same time. If you accidentally assign a SAN paging device to both the source and destination VIOS, this can result in memory corruption. When data is read from the paging device during the LPM operation or post-migration, when memory is accessed on the... [More]
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My first POWER7 LPAR.
Thanks to the IBM
Virtual Loaner Program, I was able to try out my first POWER7 LPAR today.
Some interesting items for me to research. # lparstat -i Node Name
:
node1 Partition Name
: node1 Partition Number
: 5 Type
: Shared-SMT-4 Mode
: Uncapped Entitled Capacity
: 0.50 Partition Group-ID
: 32773 Shared Pool ID ... [More]
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AIX 6.1 migration: iostat and maxuproc change to their defaults?
Before migrating to AIX 6.1 you might want to check that ncargs is set to a value greater than or equal to 256 e.g. # chdev -l sys0 -a ncargs= 256 $ lsattr -El sys0 -a ncargs ncargs 256 ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks True Let me elaborate. Recently we migrated our LPARs from AIX 5.3 to AIX 6.1. Our AIX 5.3
systems were migrating from 5300-07-05-0831 to AIX 6.1 at 6100-03-01-0921. During the testing of the migration process we noticed that some of
the sys0 tunables were being reset to their default settings after the
migration had... [More]
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Live Partition Mobility IBM Wiki site.
Came across the following IBM Wiki site which is dedicated to all things related to Live Partition Mobility (LPM) on IBMs Power6 (and Power7) platform. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/virtualization/Live+Partition+Mobility Lot's of really interesting and useful information regarding LPM. If you are planning on implementing LPM, or even if you are already using it, I recommend you take a look at this site. Cheers. Chris
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Using the AIX splitvg command.
Just the other day, I needed to use the AIX splitvg command in order to copy some data from one system to another. I thought I’d share the experience here. The splitvg command can split a single mirror copy of a fully mirrored volume group into a separate “snapshot” volume group. From the man page: The original volume group VGname will stop using the disks that are now part of the snapshot volume group SnapVGname. Both volume groups will keep track of the writes within the volume group so that when the snapshot volume group is rejoined with the... [More]
Tags:  aix lvm |
New Features in AIX Version 7.
Today, IBM announced
AIX version 7. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v71/preview.html Several new features
were mentioned in the launch, but there were two new features that I found
particularly interesting: - AIX 5.2 WPARs
for AIX 7 - Cluster
Aware AIX I thought I would
briefly describe each feature in this post. AIX 5.2 WPARs
for AIX 7 In AIX version 7,
administrators will now have the capability to create Workload Partitions
(WPARs) that can run AIX 5.2, inside an AIX 7 operating system instance. This
will... [More]
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Shared Ethernet Adapter accounting tool.
Back in 2008, VIOS version 1.5.2.1, Fix Pack
11.1 was released .
A new command was introduced with this Fix Pack, called seastat. This handy little utility can be used to view
Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) statistics per virtual I/O client. This is not to be confused with a certain
shell script that Nigel Griffiths wrote a while back! From the man page: “The
seastat command generates a report to view, per client, shared ethernet adapter
statistics. To gather
network statistics at a per-client level, advanced accounting can be... [More]
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Monitoring Multiple Shared Processor Pools with topas.
A quick tip for monitoring Multiple Shared Processor Pools with topas . Execute topas from the AIX command line. Press the ‘ p ’ key to toggle on ‘pool metrics’. You will see the default pool (pool id 0) and any other pools defined on your system. In the example below, there are two pools, the default (0) and a user defined pool (1). The default display shows the LPARs in the default pool (0), which in this case is sys06_partition8 . Using the up and down arrow keys, I place the cursor on pool ID number one, in the pool column on the... [More]
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nohup -p on AIX.
The nohup command in AIX has the
ability to “nohup” an existing process and protect if from hangup signals. Using the -p flag, an existing, running process can be “nohup’ed” and told to ignore SIGHUPs. "Why is this useful?" I hear you ask. Well, I'll often start a "long running" process
on a system at work, like a backup for instance. I'll sometimes forget to use the nohup command, so that my long running job will ignore any SIGHUPs and continue
running, say for example if my ssh session to the server dies. The nohup... [More]
Tags:  nohup gibson aix chris |
catman -w on AIX.
Have you
ever encountered this error message on AIX before? # man -k loopmount man: 0703-310 file man not found. Create the whatis database using the <catman -w> command
Of course
you have! If you’ve ever installed AIX from scratch then you have undoubtedly
seen this message. And of
course, you dutifully executed the ‘ catman –w ’ command to rectify the situation. Didn’t you? But what if
‘ catman –w ’ doesn’t work as expected? I recently came
across this minor issue. Running catman produced the following error... [More]
Tags:  gibson whatis catman chris aix man |