LPAR2RRD Briefly, Based on the same HMC data that Systems Director gathers is LPAR2RRD but it saves the data in the famous and excellent rrdtool database and graphing tools.  This is a supported by the developer which is Pavel Hampl, IBM Czech republic, as a personal project tool and does a very good job. For more details and a sample website to look round see  - AIX Wiki page for LPAR2RRD I note this is a sourceforge.net project now - See the above for a link to the project and code Cut from that AIX wiki page for the project here (all... [More]

Tags:  virtual lpar2rrd performance server aix power7 lpar monitoring systems

I get email a few times a week like "Nigel, what do you recommend for getting a good view of what the whole Power Server is doing, what resources are free for reuse for further Virtual Machines and which Virtual Machines are busy" My detailed thoughts are on the DeveloperWorks AIX wiki here: AIX Other Performance Tools but it appears no one reads websites any more, so I thought I would blog a few examples by screen capture to illuminate what is available. My first Whole Power Server and Virtual Server view recommendation is Systems... [More]

Tags:  systems power monitoring lpar performance virtual power7 server aix

 I am not making a claim to fame (OK, I am really) but the UK Power Systems Advanced Technical Support group (that is me and Gareth) dropped the term "LPAR" or Logical Partition as a New Years resolution.  We like to occasionally test to see if we can influence other IBMers and the IT Industry. We now in 2011 onwards use the terms: Virtual Server - this is the term used by Systems Director for over three years. While I can live with that name but the abbreviation of VS - it just does not feel or sound right. Virtual Machine - this... [More]

Tags:  power server vm powervm virtual lpar power7 powersystems machine

  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:  power6 aix director power systems power7

  This picture was taken by Shawn Mullen - Security Architect for AIX and cool speaker at the event too. It was taken outside of the Gala Dinner on the Wednesday evening - where we had good food and "interesting" Czech musical entertainment at the beautiful historic Zofin Palace on an island in the main river. From left to right are some of the top speakers at the conference: Ignoring the waiter with the excellent champagne! Jay Kruemcke - Power Software Program Director, USA - Mr AIX to his friends - twitter: chromeaix Patrick... [More]

Tags:  aix aix6 prague ibmtechu power aix7 power7

The SDMC Redbook is available now - actually on the announcement date - so some one was planning ahead! IBM Systems Director Management Console: Introduction and Overview , SG24-7860-00 http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247860.html 6.9 MB and 430 pages

Tags:  "power aix power sdmc hmc systems" power7

Hi, I am just back from the Prague Technical University last week. Everything worked well at the conference at the Hilton and the sessions were excellent - even the ones that I ran :-)   but I keep making one mistake ... I volunteer to give an extra session or two. I ran the following sessions: Systems Director Lecture for AIX/POWER Users This covers the basics for a techie that needs to get it running including the architecture/components, pre-requisites, Advanced plug-in selection, The Systems Director Editions for reduced cost, compared... [More]

Tags:  systems aix power power7 director

There were a number of announcements made today by Power Systems including new hardware features, a new platform management console, and new PowerVM virtualization capabilities. Two new Power Systems blade servers were announced, the PS703 and PS704 . The PS703 blade supports up to 16 processor cores in a single BladeCenter slot and the PS704 supports up to 32 cores in a double-wide blade.   The PS703 and PS704 also support a new solid state drive option. The Power 750 Express server has new processor options or 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket... [More]

Tags:  powervm power aix systems

I am preparing sessions for a POWER/AIX Technical Conference in Norway - unfortunately the only place they could book for the event was a Ski Resort up in the mountains and there is still good snow. It is a tough gig but someone has to do it :-)  As part of that conference, I am updating them on Systems Director and demonstrating it. I had a slide with these hints and tips. A slide with zero percent marks for style (far to many words and just a long list) and I thought ... I should share these with everyone, so here they are. Most of these are... [More]

Tags:  vios power7 aix endpoint systems nim director server power

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

IBM is enhancing the AIX release and service strategy effective February 15, 2011. The key changes are: Three years of new fix support for each AIX Technology Level update (starting with AIX TL 6) One Technology Level update per AIX version per year (planned for the second half of the year) Service Packs for Technology Levels will be released about four times per year These changes reflect client requests for IBM to provide new fix support for individual Technology Level updates for a longer period. The intent is to reduce the... [More]

Tags:  aix strategy release lifecycle technology level

That was a shock - right out of the blue, we are told HACMP (OK we should call it PowerHA SystemMirror but life is too short) now supports Versioned WPARs - I had customer questions on this earlier in the week but no idea it was about to be announced. We were recommending using HACMP at the AIX 7 level and treating the WAR as a very well controlled and isolated bunch of processes, file systems etc. as a single resource. But now its much simpler. Want to know more: Techdoc

Tags:  powerha hacmp wpar power7 aix

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

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

We have blogged on this really cool AIX 7 feature in the past - but here is my problem: Once I install the AIX 5.2 mksysb image in to the Workload Partition running on AIX7 it all works fine but ... then what can I show an audience to show off "AIX 5.2 running on top of AIX 7": I need a simple application that only runs on AIX 5.2 . Something simple enough that it does not take hours to install and hopefully that it is something visually interesting to see. I am told we can run Oracle 8 now including the kernel extension but its not... [More]

Tags:  aix7 power7 wpar powervm versioned aix

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

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

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

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