Working with Red Hat, we continue to expand our support for new IBM POWER8 systems hardware and features.  Our latest linkage with Red Hat revolves around the exciting new IBM Power System LC family of servers , and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 .   Just as IBM supported the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta within the Power Development Platform (PDP) program (Power Cloud), we’ll be doing the same with RHEL 7.2, but as an open Beta, available without Promo Code.  For no-charge cloud access for RHEL 7.2 , or other Operating... [More]

Tags:  rhel7.2 power8 pdp linux

Juju certainly isn’t the world’s best kept secret on quickly-and-easily modeling and bringing services to the Cloud, but what may be a more closely kept secret is that because IBM POWER8 supports Ubuntu, the power of POWER, coupled with the magic of Charms, brings open source cloud services modeling and orchestration to the world’s premier open server platform!  Consequently, whether you know about Juju and Charms, but not POWER, or vice-versa, you will find an unbeatable combination by combining the two.   First, a... [More]

Tags:  juju power8 charms

OpenStack Ironic project provides bare metal management functionality. Ironic leverages common bare metal provisioning technologies such as PXE boot and IPMI to cover a wide range of hardware. It also supports plugin architecture for vendor-specific functionality. OpenStack Ironic makes it possible to create baremetal cloud. In this article let us see how one can use OpenStack Ironic to create a baremetal cloud consisting of scale-out Power servers. The overall process is not very different than setting up baremetal cloud consisting of Intel... [More]

Tags:  scale-out ironic power power8

If any of you have been scratching your head about why building MySQL client libraries from source on the new POWER8 Ubuntu LE platform doesn't produce shared libraries (libmysqlclient.so) then please read on. Here are a few hacks which might also apply to other open source projects (more specifically their configure file and config.guess files) which have not kept up with the newest platforms. Here are the steps I used to compile libmysqlclient.so from source. wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.1.62.tar.gz untar... [More]

Tags:  mysql power8 ubuntu le

Docker is now part of  Ubuntu  Vivid Vervet  (15.04) for Power LE.  Ubuntu Vivid which just got released, includes docker (version 1.5) support. You can find the detailed release notes here . For using docker with Vivid on either baremetal or virtual machine on Power systems , just install it from the repository, start the docker engine and off you go. Using Docker Install Docker Package $sudo apt-get install docker.io Start the service and verify the installation $sudo service docker start $sudo docker info... [More]

Tags:  power8 docker ppc64el vivid

This paper describes the availability and use of the recently released Oracle 11gR2 Instant Clients.  These are used to develop applications on Linux on Power that need a connection to  the Oracle DB. Building an application with these Instant Clients allows the application to connect with an Oracle DB running on any platform Oracle delivers the database on. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Instant Client availability on Linux on Power Systems    

Tags:  rhel power8 sles power7+ applications mongodb power7

Excitement continues to build around Linux on IBM Power Systems from the first Scale-out POWER8 processor-based systems shipped in mid-2014 to the Enterprise POWER8 processor-based systems which began shipping in 4Q2014 and includes the Integrated Facility for Linux support. A big part of that excitement is around the new little endian distributions (Ubuntu and SLES), and their ties to the OpenPOWER Foundation (and the requirements it generates). Now, Red Hat has joined the party with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta for Power Systems based... [More]

Tags:  endianess power8 rhel

By: Jenifer Hopper   This article discusses some basic XML tuning tips for PowerKVM guests. It helps new users get started with editing guest XML definitions, and walks through some simple tuning examples.   The article covers various options to tune the guest disk, network, cpu, and memory. It also includes some example guest resource pinning configurations for different scenarios. Applying these tips may help improve application performance by ensuring your guest is configured properly and optimized for the KVM environment.

Tags:  powerkvm performance kvm powerlinux power8 tuning

By: Paul Clarke. The IBM Power processor family has a somewhat hidden little gem which, when exploited, could yield signficant performance improvements.  IBM Power processors have a vector processing facility (known as AltiVec, VMX, and VSX in different incantations) which can perform multiple computations with a single instruction, also known as SIMD (single instruction, multiple data).  POWER8 has 64 "vector-scalar registers' (VSRs), the first 32 of which are shared space with the 32 floating point registers.  Each VSR... [More]

Tags:  vmx vector vsx power8 power altivec

By: Jenifer Hopper   This article explains an example method to tune a full-system PowerKVM guest to achieve CPU and memory performance that is very close to non-virtualized speeds, demonstrating very low KVM overhead on a POWER8 system. It also provides some common tuning tips for running SPECjbb2005 and the STREAM memory bandwidth workload on POWER8 systems.   The example tutorial starts by measuring non-virtualized performance to provide a system baseline (non-virtualized mode is currently a technical preview), then tests... [More]

Tags:  tuning power8 benchmarks performance kvm smt linux powerkvm

By: Breno Leitão This technical preview tutorial explains how users of IBM's latest POWER8-based scale-out Linux servers can try Ubuntu running non-virtualized.  We show how Ubuntu can be installed directly on the OPAL firmware, and run as a single-image operating system directly on the system.        Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 is generally available today and fully supported as a PowerKVM guest on the IBM Power Systems shown below: IBM Power System S812L (8247-21L) IBM Power System S822L... [More]

Tags:  bare-metal non-virtualized opal ipmi power8 ubuntu petitboot ipmitool

By: Thadeu Cascardo. POWER8 processor cores support up to 8 processor threads per core, supporting simultaneous multi-threading (SMT).   Processor threads allow more instructions to be dispatched in parallel on a single processor core, by using multiple execution units.   Many workloads can benefit from the throughput gains of Simultaneous Multi-Threading support when the same code and same data is run on those multiple threads of the same core. The new PowerKVM feature available with... [More]

Tags:  smt power8 kvm

IBM Power Systems is putting data to work! On April 23, we introduced Power Systems built for bigger data demands in the cloud, expanding world's first Linux-based open server ecosystem. This provides you with tools tuned for a platform that boosts productivity and performance by removing constraints imposed by commodity architecture, along with accelerating compute and data-intensive tasks that improves cloud economics. While I trust that you have already gotten started building and deploying on this, I would like to throw a challenge your... [More]

Tags:  innovate powerlinux power8 app_throwdown

At Impact 2014, Doug Balog and Mark Shuttleworth provided a glimpse of the work completed on POWER8 systems with Ubuntu 14.04 from Canonical. In a Keynote presentation available on Youtube , Mark Shuttleworth's team does a demo of deploying 8 KVM guests - starting from scratch, installing the OS on each guest, the application software, configuring, running, inter-connecting, and ready for work.    JuJu's and Charms are actually pretty slick.   Something good to learn in the coming days. On the Youtube video, fast forward... [More]

Tags:  juju charm ubuntu power8 powerlinux canonical