VIOS Shared Storage Pools - now two movies
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 |
Virtual Fibre Channel for NPIV Requires Memory too!
N-Port Id Virtualisation (NPIV) and virtual Fibre Channel adapters - like high speed physical adapters (see an earlier blog) do require memory to operator at full speed. NPIV effectively turns the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) into a kind of virtual SAN switch where packets are passed through with no changes from the physical adapter to the client Virtual Machine (LPAR). I found it very hard to find a recommendation in the documentation but was given a rule of thumb. As before it should be noted that starving the VIOS and the Hypervisor of... [More]
Tags: thumb power7 of rule npiv adapters aix power virtual |
AIX 25th Anniversary
Twenty
five years ago on January 21, 1986, IBM Austin launched a new operating system
called IBM RT Personal Computer A dvanced I nteractive e X ecutive
-- better known as AIX-- with a new system called the IBM RT
PC. The system ran on a RISC processor codenamed “ROMP” (for Research Office
Products Division MultiProcessor) and was originally marketed as an engineering
workstation. While
the RT was an unremarkable hardware platform it did represent the first time
that IBM really started to get serious about UNIX (AIX version 1 was OEMed... [More]
Tags: aix |
AIX 25 years old Today
In case, you missed it : AIX became 25 years old, today . AIX is IBM's name for their UNIX, it stands for Advanced Interactive eXecutive and based on AT&T's UNIX System 5.2 and 5.3. I was not at the launch of the IBM RT (the computer on which it ran) but I know people that were apparently there was a lot of dry ice on the stage. Nor was I with IBM at the time but working for a small software developer company. I do remember, having a loan RT from IBM for porting our software and was impressed with the rugged machine. We weren't given... [More]
Tags: 25 aix years |
VIOS Shared Storage Pools (was called NextGen) = Simple
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 |
Updating to VIOS 2.2.0.10 FixPack 24 SP1? - Don't Make My Mistakes
We all know that a VIOS level is only fully supported for 2 years ... right! If you have problems with an older VIOS, you may be asked to upgrade to a supported level before a fix can be issued. Most teams run a dual VIOS configuration to allow painless and live upgrades for just this reason. The other reason is to survive a VIOS crash but I have never had a VIOS failure but that would be because I don't go fiddling with them nor adding unsupported software. I quickly upgraded my POWER7 VIOS from 2.1 to the latest VIOS level and made a... [More]
Tags: power power7 systems aix vios |
VIOS Next Generation phase 1
You may have seen comments or even presentations with a few slides on VIOS Next Generation or VIOS NextGen in the past year. I did at the Power Technical Universities and was very interested. Well, the first phase has been release but you may well have missed it as it appears as VIOS 2.2.0.11 FixPack 24 Service Pack 01 - not a catchy title and it slipped out below my radar! It is a regular service pack for the current VIOS and include some other features and fixes too. The first thing you have to note is that only a few features are available... [More]
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High Speed Adapters need Sensible Memory Sizes
AIX or VIOS Start-up Memory Problems I have been working with a couple of customers that have a newly setup AIX Logical Partition (LPAR) that fails to start due to not having enough memory. The common factor is that the LPAR for AIX (or VIOS) includes a good number of what I call "high speed" adapters like 10 Gbps Ethernet, or 4 Gbps or 8 Gbps Fibre Channel adapters. They tend to have multiple adapters of each type for redundancy and throughput. For example, trying to start the LPAR with 1 or 2 GB of memory but it turned out they need... [More]
Tags: 10gb 8gb fc vios memory ethernet high firbe-channel speed adapters aix |
Upgrading to Systems Director 6.2.1? - Don't get caught out, like me!
If you are running Systems Director and upgrading to the new version ... WATCH OUT !! Make sure you have 1 GB free space in /var Make sure you have 2 GB free space in /tmp I did not, this upgrade script does not check for free space and it crashed during the Systems Director updating itself (/tmp 100% full) and it never came back. I ended up with a corrupt Systems Director. The smart guys would (before the upgrade) also stopped Systems Director (smstop) and saved the database (smsave) before attempting the upgrade - so the older version... [More]
Tags: /var aix /tmp systems director upgrade |
Check those migrated Java SDK versions for POWER7
If you are migrating work from an older POWER5 or POWER6 machine/LPAR to POWER7 ... don't forget to check that those Java versions are compatible with POWER7 or you may hit "unexpected Java errors" The approved Java SDK on POWER7 are limited to particular versions with specific fixes . They can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/power7/index.html Harder to check are the Java versions which are embedded in applications. Here are two important ones for IBM software: There is a technical bulletin regarding... [More]
Tags: java power aix power7 migration systems |
AIXpert Blog is about the AIX operating system from IBM running on POWER based machines called Power Systems and software related to it like PowerVM for virtualisation, PowerVC for Deploying VM's and PowerSC for security plus performance monitoring and nmon
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