Now completed with the download at the bottom - thanks for your patience. A couple of times a month I get a question like this:  I have been sent 35 GB of nmon files covering the last month, about 6 servers with 40 LPARs (virtual machines) each server in total ~6000 files. How do I load that in to the nmon Analyser to see the graphs? My first reaction is: that is not my problem I wrote nmon for AIX and nmon for Linux and not the nmon analyser. If you stop and think, it is obvious that you are never ever going to load 35 GB in to Excel on a... [More]

If you don't know VIOS is short for Virtual I/O Server then you are probably on the wrong page :-) VIOS 3.1 - New Functions See Bob G Kovacs session on VIOS 3.1 Slide deck of 35 slides and Replay of 90 minutes POWER/AIX Virtual User Group on October 25th 2018 http://www.bit.ly/powersystemsvug The Big Item is the VIOS moves to AIX 7.2. TL3 then smaller features include: The AIX update means the latest kernel and device drivers and so performance iSCSI support via vSCSI General clean up by removing unused packages for a smaller foot print... [More]

I have been testing out the AIX libperfstat libraries new functions and got to the SSP ones. So I knock up this command to dump the config details that can be extracted.   So with 128 lines of C code we have the new command - I have not seen a new VIOS SSP command that outputs this data yet so this is new details that I think would help you rebuild a SSP if you had an accident or disaster. Command line interface # ./nsspconf -h Hint: [-v] [-h] List Shared Storage Pool info: global, disk including tier & failure group, LU... [More]

IBM POWER9 Enterprise Servers E950 & E980 have been publicly  announced. Here is your starter pack: Dates Announcement August 7th for both E950 & E980 17th August  - E950 Generally Available (GA)  i.e. shipping to clients 21st September - E980 2 nodes=  96 core GA 16th November - E980 4 nodes=192 core GA Quick Summery for Techies   Power Virtual User Group two 90 minutes Webinars on E950 and E980  Find the Power Virtual User Group here:  http://tinyurl.com/PowerVUG Host: Jyoti Dodhia, IBM Speaker:... [More]

I am assuming the latest AIX release AIX 7.2 TL2 sp2 If you are installing on older AIX versions then you may have a harder time.   1) On your workstation in your browser go to   https://public.dhe.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/ezinstall/ppc/     2) Download: README-yum text file and then please read this!  In this current yum bundle and README version it says you have to download and install a new rpm.rte package I did this will the following command on a server on the internet wget --no-check-certificate... [More]

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]