Be sure you order the correct Hardware Management Console to match the code you plan to run. The 7042 machine type is for HMCs running Version 7. This Licensed Internal Code is a requirement for managing POWER6 servers, such as the 9117-MMA. However, it will also support POWER5 and POWER5+ managed servers. The 7310 machine type is for HMCs running Version 6. You cannot manage a POWER6 server using this HMC code. It is for POWER5 and POWER5+ managed servers only. Many 7310 HMCs can be upgraded in the field to support HMC V7 Release 3 code. ... [More]

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The official rPerf rating (relative performance rating of Power based machines) are available in the pSeries, System p and now Power Systems "Facts and Features" documents that are on the IBM website. It is best to use Google for them (searching for "pseries Facts and Features" works for me). You may want to know the rPerf rating for your LPAR and an LPAR that is not one of the officially rated numbers of CPUs/Cores.  There may be ratings for 8 and 16 CPUs but your LPAR has 13 CPUs! Well, you can run the rperf script on... [More]

Tags:  rperf power6 pwer4 aix power7 power power5

I've just told me this is now available from http://www.ibm.com/systems/support/tools/systemplanningtool/ Update to Version 4.10.323.0 (once you have 4.09.323 installed) OK, we have waited long enough so "hurray" its here at last. My colleague in Norway is going to use this to install a very large Power 795 in Norway next week. He is so happy because its going to save him hours and hours in setup time and will get it right first time.

Tags:  spt vios power7 power6 sizing aix

The new November Update is available from the download site from the regular website: http://www.ibm.com/systems/software/director/downloads/index.html When you have 6.2 or 6.2.0.1 installed get Systems Director to update itself - then update the plug-ins via the download site. There is lots of new features and quality improvements too. I will summarise these in a different blog entry. One quick note: if you are doing a fresh install - install DB2 as the database.

Tags:  aix director power7 vios power power6 systems ibmi

Finally, I found the time to try this new exciting feature and it was really simple to create and operate.  I captured movie footage of my first attempt and it all worked (once I removed my spelling mistakes in commands). It only took two commands.  So the technology has advanced concepts but it really easy to use, COOL!    Some of the commands come with long option names like "-custername". A quick misquote from Star-Trek, never goes wrong: "It is UNIX Jim, but not as we know it!" One command to create my cluster,... [More]

Tags:  power provioning pool powervm power6 shared nextgen vios thin storage aix power7

I have just released a second VIOS Shares Storage Pools movie that you may like to go and watch. We now have two movies covering first an Introduction (the new movie) and then second movie covering a hands-on look at setting it up and running it. There are also the example commands and the Info and download links. I am really liking the Shared Storage Pools simple operation, disk space saving and flexibility. I currently have just a tiny 40GB pool out of which I am running 6 Client Virtual Machine which each think that have 16 GBs. That is 96... [More]

Tags:  virtualization aix power6 virtualisation systems power7 vios power

This is an odd blog - it is about the withdrawal of POWER6 - which was announced in stealth mode! It has come as a shock to some customers. Given POWER7 comes with vast improvements in price performance you might say: Who cares and who would be buying POWER6 anyway?  Well some customers with long term roll-out plans, need consistent equipment for reduced complexity and reduced testing and so still want POWER6 and could get caught out. So if you care, here is my list of withdrawal dates after which you can't buy new machines (nor POWER5 to... [More]

Tags:  systems power power6

I asked Scott about a Redbook for the new VIOS functions for Shared Storage Pools and he told me that chapters had already been added to the current PowerVM Redbooks. I almost fell of the chair!  I have been ignoring the regular Redbook update emails - but I guess I should pay more attention. So I took a look and found the Shared Storage Pools have chapters in two regular PowerVM Redbooks - note you have to download the most recent updates. IBM PowerVM Virtualization - Introduction and Configuration SG24-7940 IBM PowerVM Virtualization -... [More]

Tags:  aix powervm power7 power6 vios

I was with a large UK based insurance company last week. They, and their facilities management team, run many very large machines like POWER6 595 and POWER7 Power 770/780.  Most machines are 64 core and 2 TB of memory and running 160+ virtual machines (LPARs) on each. These are large, complex and well run machines  - all of the AIX images and VIOS are pretty well up to date with current or N -1 releases. A very pleasant surprise and impressed.  They told me that even with 2 TB of memory they tend to run out of memory before CPU cycles .  Each... [More]

Tags:  power7 wpar powersystems power6 ams aix memory ame

  Hints &Tips for Systems Director 6.2+ for AIX on POWER (Part 2) Here are a few more hints and tips - you can find Part 1 HERE 23) Excellent document on getting Systems Director running faster or starting with the right resources The document "Performance Tuning and Scaling Guide for IBM Systems Director 6.2.x" can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/SDperformance 24) Systems Director supported SAN Disks + Switches matrix can be found at http://tinyurl.com/SDdisks This explains the way that various disks are connected to Systems... [More]

Tags:  aix power6 director systems power power7

 ITM means IBM Tivoli Monitoring and is part of the Tivoli software suite for cross platform Systems Management performance monitoring. I has been around a long time and is a very feature rich product. In this blog was don't want to list some of its 100's of features but it is fully Power Systems Aware and captures all the advanced stats from new features of POWER6 and POWER7.  Here we just want to point out that it can capture all the information you want and display is any way you want from its database of stats that it collects from its... [More]

Tags:  aix power power7 power6 cec monitoring itm performance vm

Ganglia is a open source performance and configuration tool that collects data from a tiny daemon on each OS and then creates a Web server based graphical tools to draw performance data and show the configuration. With a few add-ons, you can dynamically decide the historical data you want graphed and with POWER add-ons you get the PowerVM stats for shared processors, Entitlement, physical CPU use etc.  Under the covers it is using the amazing rrdtool so you can extract the data for other uses and it automatically space manages the data. By... [More]

Tags:  powervm aix cec power7 power6 performance ganglia monitoring linux

I have just upgraded my EMEA Power Systems Advanced Technical Support internal Wiki Apache Web-server to the very latest AIX level, which is AIX 6.1 Technology Level 6 Service Pack 5 or AIX6.1TL6sp5 for short! Then I noticed that the nmon at this AIX level has been updated - I worked the code for the internal prototype of this new feature some time ago and it has arrived in the official topas/nmon code at this release - C O O L .   The latest release AIX 7.1 service pack has this new options too. The problem: As the numbers of CPU goes up with... [More]

Tags:  power6 power7 tl06 sp5 6.1 aix monitoring topas nmon physical cpu

I often get asked: How large to make a pair of Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)? The classic consultant answer is "it depends on what you are doing with Disk & Network I/O" is not very useful to the practical guy that has to size a machine including the VIOS nor the person defining the VIOS partition to install it! Added new guidance at the bottom in RED Observations : The VIOS server unfairly gets a bad press but note: Physical adapters are now in the VIOS, so device driver CPU cycles (normally hidden and roughly half of the OS CPU... [More]

Tags:  vios aix i/o sizing power6 virtual server power7 linux