I get email a few times a week like "Nigel, what do you recommend for getting a good view of what the

• whole Power Server is doing,
• what resources are free for reuse for further Virtual Machines and
• which Virtual Machines are busy"

My detailed thoughts are on the DeveloperWorks AIX wiki here: AIX Other Performance Tools but it appears no one reads websites any more, so I thought I would blog a few examples by screen capture to illuminate what is available.

My first Whole Power Server and Virtual Server view recommendation is Systems Director with VMControl

Notes:

1. This is actually from my current Systems Director presentation as it highlights some key features of the information presented.
2. To get this working you need .. Systems Director, of course, then add the VMControl plug-in - this monitors the whole server and the Virtual Servers so that it can make intelligent decisions about Live Partition Mobility for automated load balancing across your System Pool (meaning a cluster of Power machines).
3. Perhaps, I should not tell you that, even if the 60 day trail license expires, this new view keeps working!
4. It is actually getting the information from the HMC/SDMC so it works for all Virtual Server types: AIX, VIOS, Linux and IBM i.
5. The right hand column includes the Physical CPU use - this is the real number we need to monitor and is very simple to understand. In this case we have at the top middle 8 physical CPUs (cores) and we are just using 3.114 physical CPUs at the moment. We can also see the break down across the Virtual Servers and diamond6 is the largest CPU user.
   
6. Unassigned CPU is the CPU that can be given to a new Virtual Server and started up.
   
7. Note the CPU Utilization column with the mini graphs gets very confusing as 1) it can be well over 100% but 2) relative to the Entitlement. A large number may not be important because it may be for a tiny Virtual Server. Example: 500% CPU Utilization of a 0.2 CPU Entitled Virtual Server is only 1 Physical CPU but 200% CPU Utilization of a Virtual Server with 100 CPU Entitlement is VERY important.
   
8. One downside: this only appears on-screen and the data is not saved anywhere - to get that feature you need Systems Director Enterprise Edition which includes IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) but that is an example for later on.
   

Tags:  systems power monitoring performance lpar virtual power7 server aix