Initially, I had not planned to attend the Orlando Technical University but now we have the POWER9 half rolled out: IBM POWER9 AC922   for NVIDIA  GPUs for IBM PowerAI and all those exciting new HPC workloads IBM POWER9 Regular Scale-Out Servers like S922 and S924 plus L922 and S914 and the SAP-HANA variations H922 and H924 I asked the manager as I now need to talk face-to-face to my USA IBM counterparts about these servers and two more much larger servers coming out later this year.  My manager said I could... [More]

This is part two covering the POWER8 based Hardware Management Console The first part was covering the installation on the new POWER8 based Hardware Management Console. You can find it here: AIXpert Blog on HMC_7063_CR1_hardware_install_POWER8_based_HMC First a small recap on what we covered at the end of Part 1 about the network ports. Below we can see the lower HMC has three network ports in use. The low HMC has VGA screen and USB keyboard and USB mouse. Two power supply cable from the HMC to two different Power Distribution... [More]

We at Advanced Technology Support, UK have been running the HMC based on POWER8 for 4 months but it was based on a proto-type HMC based on the S822LC Supermicro Stratton. T his week, our genuine official HMC's that use the POWER8 chips have arrived, so I thought I would via pictures show you what we did to get them installed.   You can find the IBM KnowledgeCenter information here:   https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/POWER8/p8hai/p8hai_install7063_kickoff.htm This is part one covering the POWER8 based Hardware... [More]

By popular demand, I have been busy working on this in the background. As you know nmon is not my day job.   nmon2json First , is a tool to take an nmon output file (.nmon which is a Comma Separated Value text file) and convert it into JSON format.  JSON is the preferred format for many "new age" web 2.0 tools to ingest into a database and/or support dynamic graphing of the stats.  JSON is a simple format but there are options for grouping stats.  I would like your comments on that and what is the best... [More]

  This comes to us from Gareth Coates - my peer in ATS - Thanks, Gareth. Summary AIX5.3 is no longer supported natively on POWER8 AIX5.3 TL 12 can be supported in a versioned WPAR (vWPAR) on POWER8 based servers GA was 14th October 2011 - Generally Available EOM is 30th January 2018 - End of Marketing (i.e. you can purchase it) EOS is 30th April 2019 - End of Service (extended service may or may not be available)   IBM will no longer provide Installation Media for AIX 5.3, (IBM does not encourage fresh AIX 5.3 installs) so the... [More]

Work in Progress - Basic detail sections are  done. N ow adding "More Information links" sections PowerVM - 1st place Briefly: Enterprise class virtualisation on the complete POWER range to run AIX, IBM i and Linux. Includes: Hardware Management Console (HMC), Firmware based Power Processor Hypervisor called pHype & Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) Providing Virtual Machines (VM), virtual network & virtual storage Benefits:  All you need for create & control of virtual machines including exact CPU cycles guaranteed and... [More]

Ready for use. Please feedback success or problems.  I will actively support you. See Download section. Objectives: In this version, we will extract the POWER8 energy stats (Watts electricity and Temperatures) in 34 lines of Python code using a new Python Module. The Shared Storage Pool I/O and Server = LPAR stats work the same way but as there is more stats take a little more code but works the same way.   Output: Sample output for Energy stats - for SSP I/O and Server +LPAR performance stats fine the grapghs later on.   Sample... [More]

  Before the results a few observations: Questions: How many of these features are originally in the AT&T UNIX 5.2 and 5.3 from which AIX was developed? Answer: None of them as they are all IBM improvements.   Question: Which are long-term AIX features (i.e excluding feature introduced with AIX 6 and 7)? Answer: Roughly half of them and many from AIX 3 which was the first to run on POWER processors. And the New Features:     And the Winners f rom 178 Voters with 1158 Votes cast  are ... Comments Very... [More]

I have a few customers and IBMers tell me their Shared Storage Pool (SSP) failed to come up after some major disaster like Total network outage Total SAN outage Total site unexpected electrical power outage They then fiddle about and eventually, like hours or even days later, send me email.   All I can say is I am sorry to hear about their issue, that I don't have that problems and I have had my share of electricity cuts (ironically while testing the uninterruptible power supply!).  But I can offer some advice . . .   The... [More]

So I have a Linux on Power Scale-Out S822L Server with VM with physical adapters but which Ethernet adapter is which after I added two more? First port of call is the regular lspci command : # lspci 0000:70:00.0 RAID bus controller: IBM PCI-E IPR SAS Adapter (ASIC) (rev 02) 0001:80:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01) 0001:80:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01) 0001:80:00.2 Ethernet controller: Broadcom... [More]

It seems that not many nmon users know that nmon for AIX will detect and show on-screen or save to the nmon file many AIX events. That is the problem about being the nmon designer and developer for so many years - it is called expert blindness. It is totally obvious to me until  a respected nmon user asks a question to which my initial reaction is how can you not know the answer to that ! It can detect these among a number of other events and record them: Live partition Mobility (LPM) where you move a running Logical Partition... [More]

This AIXpert Blog has been superceded by version 3 of the scripts and covers: - Energy, SSP I/O and not Server and LPAR Performance Stats. Click HERE  to get to the new AIXpert Blog entry. This Topic was covered in a Power Systems Virtual User Group webinar on 21st June 2017 you can catch the replay here:  Power Systems VUG website Please watch the video and/or look at the slides for a 1 hour basics and 45 minutes programming details What do we want ? Energy Per POWER server a simple Comma Separated Value (CSV) file ... [More]

Due to IBM marketing deciding to have four machines with the same Hollywood name = S822LC - every one has given up on them. This blog is about the POWER8 Minsky machine. This is developed and manufactured by Wistron for IBM under the OpenPOWER program and sold as the IBM S822LC for High Performance Computing (HPC) .   Unlike some of the other S822LC model the name is actually correct. This computer only makes sense to me if you have a configuration with the very high performance maths computation NVIDIA GPUs.  It also has higher... [More]

With my new fangled REST API Python scripts I collect stats every 5 minutes for each machine electrical power Watts and Temperature plus Shared Storage Pool disk I/O. Then I noted the the HMC " Manage Users and Tasks " shows 3000+ HMC sessions and growing a few every five minutes. I add 5 and 5 and get " oops " so the REST API calls are creating sessions that are not closed or timing out. Eventually your HMC will refuse further REST API calls - mine certainly did and it requires a reboot at that point. You can't try... [More]