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Tuning Virtual Ethernet adapters for (even) better backup performance.
Are you backing up your AIX systems
over Virtual Ethernet adapters? Of course you are, who isn’t right? Are your
backup server and clients on the same physical POWER system? You are most
likely backing up over Virtual Ethernet to another AIX LPAR that is running
your enterprise backup software, such as TSM or Legato Networker for example.
And you probably have a dedicated private virtual network (and adapters) on
both the clients and the server to handle the traffic for the nightly backups.
The next question is, have you tuned your... [More]
Tags:  min_buf_huge=96 backup netstat slow hypervisor -a aix max_buf_huge=128 tsm chris_gibson min_buf_large=96 max_buf_large=256 networker min_buf_medium=512 -l adapter max_buf_medium=1024 virtual ent1 chdev –a ethernet |
Replicated rootvg, ghostdev and NPIV
My team and I have recently
been trying to stream line our AIX disaster recovery process. We’ve been
looking for ways to reduce our overall recovery time. Several ideas were tossed
around such as a) using a standby DR LPAR with AIX already installed and using
rsync/scp to keep the Prod & DR LPARs in sync and b) using alt_disk_copy
(with the –O flag for a device reset) to clone rootvg to an alternate disk
which is then replicated to DR. These methods may work but are cumbersome to
administer and (in the case of alt_disk_copy) require... [More]
Tags:  chris led recovery hds rootvg fc support ghostdev lpar replication hung gibson 554 boot replicated chris_gibson vfc vsp aix channel san virtual fibre dr disaster hang npiv |
New HMC commands: chnportlogin and lsnportlogin - Login in Virtual Fibre Channel adapters for NPIV client LPARs.
There are two new HMC (V7.7.3.0) commands that can force a client Virtual Fibre Channel adapter to log into a SAN. This should make the life of the AIX and SAN administrator easier, as they will no longer need to install AIX in order for the new VFC adapters to log into the SAN. Although there was an unsupported method* for doing this already (see links below). Nor will the SAN admins need to “blind” zone the WWPNs. There was some indication of this in the latest VIOS FP readme: ... [More]
Tags:  virtual gibson aix chnportlogin lsnportlogin channel npiv chris adapter fibre |
New virtual Ethernet adapter attribute for largesend on AIX
The latest versions of AIX now allow largesend on virtual adapters to remain persistent across reboots. I can’t find any
information for this attribute in the AIX 7.1 Information center yet. The new attrribute is called mtu_bypass and can be changed with the chdev command. e.g ; AIX 7.1
TL1 SP2. # oslevel -s 7100-01-02-1150 ; LARGESEND
is off . # ifconfig
en1 en1: flags=1e080863,480<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,GROUPRT,64BIT, CHECKSUM_OFFLOAD(ACTIVE),CHAIN > inet 10.153.20.46 netmask
0xffff0000... [More]
Tags:  aix mtu_bypass on virtual adapters largesend ethernet chris_gibson |
Collecting WWPNs for new Virtual Fibre Channel Adapters
I was
collecting a list of WWPNs for a bunch of new AIX LPARs I was installing from
scratch. There were two ways I could find the WWPN for a virtual Fibre Channel
adapter on a new LPAR i.e. one that did not yet have an operating system
installed. I started by
checking the LPAR properties from the HMC (as shown below). To speed
things up I moved to the HMC command line tool, lssyscfg , to display the
WWPNs (as shown below). hscroot@hmc1:~> lssyscfg -r prof -m 750-2
-F virtual_fc_adapters --filter lpar_names=lpar1... [More]
Tags:  vfc wwpn sed lssyscfg aix fibre gibson hmc channel chris virtual |
Understanding viostat -adapter vfchost output.
The first
time I ran the ’ viostat –adapter’ command I expected to find
non-zero values for kbps , tps , etc, for each vfchost adapter. However, the values were always zero, no matter
how much traffic traversed the adapters.
$ viostat
-adapter 1 10
... vadapter: Kbps tps
bkread ... [More]
Tags:  virtual vios powervm channel vfchost aix fibre viostat vfc -adapter npiv |
Managing an existing AIX virtual machine with PowerVC
It’s possible, with PowerVC, to manage existing AIX and Linux partitions in your environment. This may be useful for customers that have recently installed PowerVC in their environment and have existing AIX partitions. The question that is often asked is “ Can I manage these existing partitions with PowerVC? ”. These existing partitions were deployed outside of PowerVC, often long before PowerVC was even available as product from IBM. Fortunately the answer to this question is most likely yes! Before you add an existing... [More]
Tags:  powervc virtual aix machines managing existing |
Running the Virtual HMC on your Apple MacBook Pro.
My colleague in Lab Services, Ben Swinney, recently configured the Virtual HMC on his Apple Macbook. He was kind enough to write up his experience, so that others could also run the vHMC on their Mac. Me included! You can find Ben’s instructions here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/cgaix/resource/vHMC_running_on_Apple_hardware.pdf Thanks Ben!
Tags:  hardware gibson power8 systems power ibm management swinney vhmc chris hmc aix virtual ben console |