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

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

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

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

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

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

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