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Find the latest performance tuning hints and tips and white papers for Linux® on IBM Z® and LinuxONE.

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z & LinuxONE - Capacity Planning: Five Checkmarks You Don't Want to Miss

Capacity panning is an essential step for implementing any OpenShift on IBM Z solution to avoid possible pitfalls during the proof-of-concept or production stage. For your estimates, you must factor in resource sharing, virtualization, overcommitment, LPAR weights, entitlements, polarization, and relative shares.

This presentation explores LPAR performance concepts and walks you through z/VM and KVM virtualization best practices - always keeping a sharp focus on OpenShift on IBM Z as the solution platform. The "Five Checkmarks" address some of the most common misconceptions in OpenShift on IBM Z capacity planning.

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z & LinuxONE - Capacity Planning: Five Checkmarks You Don't Want to Miss

Creation date
February 2022

Exploring the performance of network adapters for Linux on IBM Z

With OSA-Express and RoCE Express, IBM® provides two types of physical network adapters for Linux standard networking usage on IBM Z. In this presentation, the performance of the most recent OSA-Express, OSA-Express7S 25 GbE, is compared to its predecessor, OSA-Express6S 10 GbE, and additionally to the 25 GbE RoCE Express2.1 on an IBM z15™. It is shown that the OSA-Express7S 25 GbE significantly improves performance compared to its predecessor, while still hitting some limitations. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of the 25 GbE RoCE Express2.1 are highlighted. The presentation concludes describing benefits and downsides of configuring receive packet steering (RPS), a Linux networking feature, with OSA-Express7S and RoCE Express2.1.

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Exploring the performance of network adapters for Linux on IBM Z

Creation date
December 2021

High Availability Clustering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Mission-critical workloads cannot rely on environments with a single point of failure. A high-availability clustering-solution ensures the continuous operation of the environment. Each section provides an overview of the basics followed by an example. Topics include setting up an LPAR cluster with a KVM guest as a resource.

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High Availability Clustering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Creation date
December 2021

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z - Performance, Quality & Best Practices

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a highly automated hybrid cloud platform supports both traditional and micro-service applications in the cloud. Learn what OCP does to maintain a high service quality and how the quality attributes interact. This presentation examines the OCP quality attributes with a focus on performance when running on IBM Z. Also, find tips for tuning OCP on IBM Z for best performance.

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z - Performance, Quality & Best Practices

Creation date
October 2021

CPUMF - Recommendations for Linux on IBM Z

This presentation gives a brief introduction to the CPU Measurement Facilities. It describes how to enable counter sets and sampling, and how to record and visualize the hardware and software perf events. It also shows how to use perf to record counter statistics and measure the exploitation of specific hardware features through Linux on IBM Z.

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CPUMF - Recommendations for Linux on IBM Z

Latest update
November 2021

High Availability Clustering with RHEL 7/8 and z/VM - Advanced setup

In production environments, applications are often deployed across multiple IBM Z hardware systems to address maintenance windows or unplanned outages. This presentation explores high availability with two Z hardware systems and a z/VM® SSI environment. It examines how high availability can be built with the RHEL HA solution and which challenges arise with two hardware systems.

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High Availability Clustering with RHEL 7/8 and z/VM - Advanced setup

Creation date
August 2021

Monitoring with RHEL 8 and KVM - Getting Started, Hints and Tips

Monitoring virtualized environments with numerous KVM guests can be a challenge, and using suitable tooling is critical. This presentation explores the most important KVM related monitoring tools (kvm_stat, sysstat, pcp, and perf_kvm).

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Monitoring with RHEL 8 and KVM - Getting Started, Hints and Tips

Creation date
May 2021

Elasticsearch on IBM Z - Performance Experiences, Hints and Tips

Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine according to db-engines.com. The number of use cases is huge, the community is extremely active, and new releases are made available frequently. Elasticsearch can be embedded into many software stacks, for example Red Hat OpenShift. This presentation summarizes tuning hints and tips that can improve the performance of Elasticsearch significantly when running on Linux on IBM Z.

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Elasticsearch on IBM Z - Performance Experiences, Hints and Tips

Creation date
May 2021

High Availability Clustering with RHEL 8 and z/VM - Getting Started, Hints and Tips

Mission-critical workloads must not rely on environments with a single point of failure. A high availability clustering solution ensures the continuous operation of the environment. This presentation provides step-by-step guidance for an active-passive failover setup with Red Hat high-availability on z/VM.

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High Availability Clustering with RHEL 8 and z/VM - Getting Started, Hints and Tips

Creation date
March 2021

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z Networking Performance

Cloud-native applications can use high-performance network connections to achieve high throughput and low latency. This presentation analyzes the performance of the network stack of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z in detail and uses this knowledge as a basis for performance tuning of hybrid cloud platforms.

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Z Networking Performance

Creation date
November 2020

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z - Performance Experiences, Hints and Tips

Red Hat OpenShift enables Hybrid Cloud solutions on the IBM Mainframe. This presentation summarizes the experiences of the Linux on IBM Z performance team when evaluating OpenShift on IBM Z. It also provides hints and tips for improving the performance of an OpenShift cluster for typical cloud-native applications.

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Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z - Performance Experiences, Hints and Tips

Creation date
October 2020

Scaling HyperPAV alias devices on Linux guests on z/VM

This white paper analyzes the performance when scaling HyperPAV alias devices in real and virtualized DASD setups. It shows significant performance improvements for different disk I/O workloads on z/VM guests running Linux on IBM Z.

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Scaling HyperPAV alias devices on Linux guests on z/VM

Creation date
April 2020

Compiler GCC

Presentation abstract:
  • Development of new GCC features and exploitation of new hardware features for IBM Z
  • GCC versions in distributions for IBM Z
  • Optimizing C/C++ code
  • Special optimization - FDO and LTO
  • Influence of compiler versions and compile options on performance
  • Options for 31-bit code

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Compiler GCC

Creation date
November 2018
Last update
September 2019

KVM Network Performance - Best Practices and Tuning Recommendations

This presentation provides an overview of the different networking configuration choices running KVM guests on the IBM Z platforms. It also provides tuning recommendations for the KVM host and KVM guest environment to achieve greater network performance.

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KVM Network Performance - Best Practices and Tuning Recommendations

Creation date
October 2016
Last update
September 2020

KVM Network Performance - Exploitation of IP Routing

This presentation shows how to set up network connectivity for KVM guests via Open vSwitch on IBM Z platforms using IP routing capabilities of the TCP/IP stack. It shows how to provide a complex network connectivity to a KVM guest including HiperSockets, just defined by software. It also provides a network performance comparison and recommends configurations based on the application scenario.

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KVM Network Performance - Exploitation of IP Routing

Creation date
October 2019

NVMe with LinuxONE: Performance Insights

This presentation summarizes a performance study done with NVMe storage that can be used along with IBM LinuxONE Servers. It includes an I/O performance comparison for NVMe storage versus external storage, with various I/O patterns. In addition, NVMe storage failover scenarios and performance states are considered.

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NVMe with LinuxONE: Performance Insights

Creation date
October 2019