Java on AIX Tuning Tool for Power & a Whitepaper for Java on Power7
I just noted two great new things to help those running Java on AIX and it seems hard to avoid Java these days! I was just monitoring a customer machine with 1500 WebSphere Application Servers (WAS) each with 100 to 150 threads so roughly 200,000 threads!!! More impressing was that just 20 Power7 physical CPUs was supporting this workload. So here are two things that can help: 1. Java Performance Advisor (JPA) Available for download to anyone on IBM DeveloperWorks website. This is a powerful new tool to help people identify opportunities to... [More]
Tags: whitepaper tuning best tool power6 on power7 practice aix and java |
nmon - I can't see all the CPUs on-screen. Please Help!
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 |
nmon - Do we have a serious problem .... or not!
I am working with a larger Power 7 customer and learning lots about life in the large and professional computer room. Oh Gosh!!! My Power Virtual Machine (Logical Partition) is totally busy. Oh Heck!!! Look at all that System time, we have a serious problem!! Or do we? Take a look at the below nmon stats and make up your own mind before scrolling down. Actually, we are in offices many miles away from most of the Power 7 computers because the machines are
split across three sites. More than twenty Power 7 Model 795's is
enough to... [More]
Tags: tl06 time aix system power performance tl05 nmon |
Systems Director - Can't get your HMC recognised ?
So you have Discovered, given Access and run Inventory on your HMC and it is not finding the Servers and Virtual Servers that the HMC is connected too! What do you do next? Well here are a series of suggestions for you to try (this is not an official diagnostics path but might help you out): How much memory has your HMC got? I get people trying to use old HMCs and the original ones had just 1 GB of memory. This is basically not enough these days - in my humble opinion - unless you have just one machine! But how do you find out what you have?... [More]
Tags: aix power7 powervm director hmc power6 systems |
Server consolidation actually works! IBM eats its own food.
I just moved our Power 5 based internal to IBM Wiki Webserver to Power 6 p570 which was recently freed up now that we (Advanced Technical Support, EMEA) are mainly working on the Power 7 machines. The Power 6 machine are still very useful for testing beta copies of new software like AIX and the end of year VIOS functions but some features are Power 7 dependent. We are removing the Power 5 machines because we are moving building and to a much smaller computer room and have to move from 15 racks down to 5 racks. We have been a little lazy in... [More]
Tags: vios 6 storwize asmi power7 upgrade apache power webserver aix |
Rule of Thumb: Sizing the Virtual I/O Server
I often get asked: How large to make a pair of Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)? The classic consultant answer is "it depends on what you are doing with Disk & Network I/O" is not very useful to the practical guy that has to size a machine including the VIOS nor the person defining the VIOS partition to install it! Added new guidance at the bottom in RED Observations : The VIOS server unfairly gets a bad press but note: Physical adapters are now in the VIOS, so device driver CPU cycles (normally hidden and roughly half of the OS CPU... [More]
Tags: vios aix i/o sizing virtual power6 power7 server linux |
nmon - new online Physical CPU Graphs arrive for latest AIX 6.1
I have just upgraded my EMEA Power Systems Advanced Technical Support internal Wiki Apache Web-server to the very latest AIX level, which is AIX 6.1 Technology Level 6 Service Pack 5 or AIX6.1TL6sp5 for short! Then I noticed that the nmon at this AIX level has been updated - I worked the code for the internal prototype of this new feature some time ago and it has arrived in the official topas/nmon code at this release - C O O L . The latest release AIX 7.1 service pack has this new options too. The problem: As the numbers of CPU goes up with... [More]
Tags: power6 power7 tl06 6.1 sp5 aix monitoring topas nmon physical cpu |
AME Memory Expansion - What is a typical Expansion Factor?
Active Memory Expansion (AME) can second in my Top Ten Technologies to be business as usual in the next few years from hundreds of votes world wide. It is available on Power7 machines with AIX 6.1 TL4 SP2 onwards and AIX 7, of course. This allows memory to look at lot bigger than it actually is - to allow more LPARs to be running on a machine or giving headroom for boosts performance. The usefulness of AME is all down to the Expansions Factor (EF) - which is based on the compression ratio achieved for memory pages. If the EF very low then you... [More]
Tags: memory factor expansion ame ram aix power7 |
Which browser & version for HMC and Systems Director?
For Systems Director 6.2 supports Firefox 3.6, 3.5 and 3.0 - you have to be nuts to not be using 3.6 IMHO! Internet Explorer 7 or 8. See http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/director/v6r2x/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.director.plan.helps.doc/fqm0_r_supported_web_browsers.html Unofficially, I find Google Chrome 12 works fine too. For Hardware Management Console (HMC) (I am assuming a recent HMC V7R7.3 level here) it supports (from the Power7 manuals) Internet Explorer 7 but says IE 8 is not supported - just tried this and the left hand menu got... [More]
Tags: ie console director management explorer chrome internet systems hardware firefox hmc |
Over enthusiastic PM for AIX service = could annoy administrators!
We have had the Global Services offering "Performance Management for AIX" server for years (even decades) - it gets shorten to "PM for AIX" or "PM for Power Systems" which sounds like a "Prime Minister for the Electricity Board" to English people! Anyway, briefly this offers: PM collects local AIX stats and configuration details, then sends the information to IBM over a secure Internet link to be analysed. The results includes performance graphs, performance trends, config reports and warnings about... [More]
Tags: management recording performance tl06 aix topas 6.1 smitty pm |
PowerVM Virtual I/O Server - Recommended Levels
While I was installing a re-purposed POWER6 machine over the weekend, got round to installing my Dual Virtual I/O Servers, from DVD and then upgrading from there and I noticed a new service pack 2 for the latest VIOS version. It must have sneaked out without me noticing and there is a Interim fix too. The VIOS 2.2.0.12-FP24 SP2 Readme highlights lots of fixes including some for the Shared Storage Pool feature. A feature that I have been using and talking about (see this blog for more information). This got me thinking! I talk to lots... [More]
Tags: server power7 vios aix recommended levels i/o virtual power powervm |
Modifying an Appliance - VMControl Systems Director for AIX
With Systems Director and VMControl Standard Edition (this was called Image Manager), you can Capture an AIX Virtual Server to an appliance in the VMControl Repository. Then later Deploy the appliance to a new Virtual Server on a different Power machine. What this means in proper technical "AIX speak" is Systems Director can: Create a mksysb to a NIM server and also save the LPAR settings (numbers of CPU, RAM, network and disks). Later you can perform a NIM client install from the mksysb and it automatically uses the same LPAR... [More]
Tags: director vmcontrol appliance modify systems aix |
Whole Power Server + Virtual Server Monitoring - Part 5 via Ganglia
Ganglia is a open source performance and configuration tool that collects data from a tiny daemon on each OS and then creates a Web server based graphical tools to draw performance data and show the configuration. With a few add-ons, you can dynamically decide the historical data you want graphed and with POWER add-ons you get the PowerVM stats for shared processors, Entitlement, physical CPU use etc. Under the covers it is using the amazing rrdtool so you can extract the data for other uses and it automatically space manages the data. By... [More]
Tags: powervm aix cec power7 power6 performance ganglia monitoring linux |
Whole Power Server + Virtual Server Monitoring - Part 4 via ITM
ITM means IBM Tivoli Monitoring and is part of the Tivoli software suite for cross platform Systems Management performance monitoring. I has been around a long time and is a very feature rich product. In this blog was don't want to list some of its 100's of features but it is fully Power Systems Aware and captures all the advanced stats from new features of POWER6 and POWER7. Here we just want to point out that it can capture all the information you want and display is any way you want from its database of stats that it collects from its... [More]
Tags: aix power power6 power7 cec monitoring itm performance vm |
AIX Virtual User Group - Seven Free Webinar sessions on Systems Director on Power
The USA AIX Virtual User Group have just announced a Systems Director on Power series of live webinar sessions in the next 3 months. Briefly: Starts May 12th 2011. It is delivered remotely, over the Internet, so you can listen in from your desk and watch the slides or any demonstrations with no travelling. It covers the Overview and Basics through to the high function Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) features that are part of the Enterprise Edition of Systems Director. This is delivered by the USA Advanced Technical Skills (ATS) group and I recognise... [More]
Tags: systems director aix vug power power7 |
Quick temporary fix for nmon's Analyser AME stats
If you collect nmon data while running Active Memory Expansion (AME), you get extra performance stats as below: MEM tab Size of the Compressed pool(MB) Size of true memory(MB) Expanded memory size(MB), Size of the Uncompressed pool(MB) MEMNEW tab Compressed Pool% PAGE tab for paging rates (pages per second) but this time very quickly in and out of the compressed memory area Compressed pool pgins - other tools like topas call this CI Compressed pool pgouts - other tools like topas this call CO Unfortunately, the last two appear in Excel columns... [More]
|
Whole Power Server + Virtual Server Monitoring - Part 3 via topas CEC analyser
We have all probably seen or used the topas CEC on-screen view (topas -C command). This is started while logged into one AIX Virtual Server (LPAR) and shows all the other AIX or VIOS (as it is based on AIX) Virtual Servers of a single Power Server. Here is a reminder - this is on-line, on-screen and updated every 10 seconds or so: Here my Virtual Servers are called purple<something> and below the top machine summary we have a line for each Virtual Server and stats like AIX release, memory use, CPU stats (PhysB is the Physical CPU time... [More]
Tags: power virtual server aix systems lpar power7 monitoring topas performance |
Whole Power Server + Virtual Server Monitoring - Part 2 via lpar2rrd
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 |
Whole Power Server + Virtual Server Monitoring - Part 1 via Systems Director
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 |
The LPAR term is dead - Long live the Virtual Server / Machine
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 lpar virtual power7 powersystems machine |
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
Tags
Recent tweets
