It was my birthday on Saturday and by pure luck my Raspberry Pi was delivered the day before - what a great day "hacking" (in the old sense of the word). I have been waiting for a few months for this delivery - What a treat!!  If you have not heard of this credit size computer before here is the back ground.   The Problem In the UK, school information technology education has been pitifully reduced to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My own kids came home badly depressed as they started the classes as they knew far more than the... [More]

Tags:  nweb ams aix power7 ame power amd wpar nmon aixpert itm isd rbac raspberry ssd dlpar ganglia charm pi ssp

It has been a busy fortnight and I just realised I have micro-blogged (Twitter) comments and link but neglected this AIXpert Blog - sorry about that.  Here is a summary and a lot more thoughts that Twitter allows. I actually like the discipline of the Twitter 140 characters as if forces you to get to the point!    Firefox First, I have upgraded to Firefox 10 Enterprise from 3.6 - I was having multiple problems with the older release that had previously seemed to be the only safe one for using both HMC and IBM Systems Director.  In particular,... [More]

Tags:  power7 pure systems power powervm sdmc

 I may have written about these in previous blogs but these have been updated and added too them. They are in my regular Systems Director presentation but I thought they should be shared to a wider audience - no sense is sitting on good information.  These are very much my thoughts and opinions for POWER and mostly AIX systems. These are not official IBM statements.   1) Quick Introduction . If you want a 12 minute look at how Systems Director can benefit Power and AIX system administrators in eight ways then watch my 12 minute movie. After... [More]

Tags:  systems aix director & links power tips

As we all know, the advanced PowerVM virtualisation functions of POWER7 based machines are implemented in the hardware (the POWER7 processor itself and the System Firmware, which includes PowerVM Hypervisor) for increased security, high performance and reliability.  After more than a year of POWER7 field experience and fixes to increase RAS, further development of still more virtualisation functions and improved algorithms for higher performance - it is very important for all of us to install the newer levels of System firmware to avoid already... [More]

Tags:  systems hmc hypervisor firmware 795 power7 power 780 770

I have been running the nmon ( n igel's mon itor) for AIX project for 15 years now but I am still learning.   I initially wrote it to help me run AIX 3.2 then AIX 4 benchmarks on RS/6000 machines as running the older "down the screen" and "line by line" tools like vmstat and iostat was driving me mad (literally making my eye hurt) and so using screen curses enabled the number to stop moving on the screen.  nmon's second most important feature was to make graphing the results simpler as a graph includes the time dimension, it... [More]

Tags:  nmon aix analyzer power weighted average analyser

So a long download of about 7 hours for the 1.9 GB but a reasonably quick install.  Fresh AIX 6.1 TL6 and service pack 6 installed.  See my Update below for a problem with this AIX level. Prepared a /database filesystem for the DB2 database. The Pre-Install Utility told me to fix some file system sizes, more paging space and ulimit - good stuff. The Installer worked fine. The CIM Server install seems to take for ages at the start!  It then refreshes the Common Agent, installed the default "managed" DB2 database invisibly behind the... [More]

Tags:  aix on install systems 6.3 power director power7

IBM Systems Director 6.3 Arrives Early Yes, you read that right - it arrived earlier than the date in the IBM Announcement - a free to use unexpected Xmas present from IBM. I have never heard of an early delivery before - perhaps I am getting to old and cynical :-)   The Base Server download for AIX is a larger 1.9 GB file (was 1.3 GB for 6.2) but that includes includes AEM,VMControl (and Service and support manager but we probably don't need that as we have the function in Power Systems via the HMC).  They all get installed in one go but you... [More]

Tags:  systems director arrives aix early ibm download 6.3 power power7

I thought I should summarise the long eleven part Local, Near & Far POWER7 Affinity series.   1) Placement: Find out the layout of your boxes CPU and RAM and if the RAM is evenly distributed across available DIMMs Find out the placement of your Virtual Machines (LPARs) with lssrad -av  - or - topas -M 2) SMT4 : Expect POWER7 SMT4 CPU use to “look” different POWER5 & 6 have two equal threads POWER7 shuts down threads 3 & 4 and even thread 2 - when there is not enough processes running. 3) Entitlement : Only set minimum Entitlements,... [More]

Tags:  lpar aix hypervisor entitlement processor systems firmware power power7 powervm virtual

I have been wondering why the lower end POWER7 machines have local and far memory and not local and near. Perhaps you wondered too! Well at the Miami Power Technical University, I got to talk to Dr Joel Tendler (IBMer) and a POWER7 processor guru and put the question to him. He covered this sort of architectural topic in his presentation at the event and I learnt a lot in this area by listening to the "master". Below is some background and the explanation too.   The POWER7 chips has two memory controllers for maximum performance but... [More]

Tags:  795 xyz 780 near systems aix memory ab 770 far power7 power local bus

This is a follow on to a previous blog on " PowerVM Virtual Ethernet Speed is often confused with VIOS, SEA IVE/HEA speed "- here is a Direct Link   I regularly get asked : "I have just heard about this [PowerVM virtual switch | vSwitch | Hypervisor Ethernet Switch] is available but I can't find out any information at all, help!"   They are wanting to run two (or more) virtual switches within the one Power machine to completely separate the network packets of groups of virtual machines (LPARs) so they know for sure there can... [More]

Tags:  vswitch switch hypervisor power6 power aix ethernet powervm power7 virtual

This is a follow on from yesterdays blog due to Chris Gibson highlighting a question/concern from one of his customers in Australia.They were comparing Power6 and Power7 and the utilisation numbers from the SMT Logical Processors and the graphs look different. I looked at some nmon data (what else!) and yes they are looking different and then I ran a simple generated workload test and duplicated the graphs.  Below I then explain them - once again these are my personal observations rather than an official AIX developers insider statement.   I... [More]

Tags:  smt core powervm aix logical threads aggressive vp processor intelligent power7 power

Before we look further in to memory affinity we need to recap on the scheduling of processes and process threads of a multi-threaded process to simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) processors like POWER7.  POWER5 and POWER6 had two modes of SMT off (one thread) and on (two threads) - with SMT=on two processes run at the same time (in the same clock cycle) on the CPU-core but using the different logical units inside of the CPU-core (units like the integer maths (there is more than one), floating point maths (there is more than one), compare and... [More]

Tags:  logical core powervm vp aix smt power7 processor power

I need you to help me settle an argument or rather lack of information. I am getting conflicting messages about whether these smaller Power7 machines use Local and Near or Local and Far memory. I documented what I thought was correct in the Part 1 of this series of blog's.   Actually, there is not much difference as these machines have two tiers of memory like "on the chip" or "some where else" so the names are hardly vital but I would like my facts straight. Unfortunately, I don't have examples of these machines with more... [More]

Tags:  730 affinity srad 740 lssrad 750 710 lpar aix power powervm 720 power7 vm

Here is another question from that larger Power 7 machine customer. They have large Virtual Machines (Logical Partitions) and can't see all the CPUs on the screen. This is made worst by Power 7 machines - not a problem with the processors or machines but there are: So many CPUs on larger machines like Power 770/780 and the mighty Power 795 Then the new Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) now means four threads per physical CPU (core). This means lots of physical CPUs and each has four logical CPUs.  So what happens on the screen - you see a... [More]

Tags:  nmon physical longer cpu power aix powervm term