Virtual I/O Server Performance Advisor

The VIOS Performance Advisor tool provides advisory reports that are based on the key performance metrics on various partition resources that are collected from the VIOS environment.

Starting with Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) Version 2.2.2.0, you can use the VIOS Performance Advisor tool. Use this tool to provide health reports that have proposals for making configurational changes to the VIOS environment and to identify areas to investigate further. On the VIOS command line, enter the part command to start the VIOS Performance Advisor tool.

You can start the VIOS Performance Advisor tool in the following modes:
  • On-demand monitoring mode
  • Postprocessing mode
When you start the VIOS Performance Advisor tool in the on-demand monitoring mode, provide the duration for which the tool must monitor the system in minutes. The duration that you provide must be 10 - 60 minutes at the end of which the tool generates the reports. During this time, samples are collected at regular intervals of 15 seconds. For example, to monitor the system for 30 minutes and generate a report, enter the following command:
part –i 30
Reports for the on-demand monitoring mode are successfully generated in the ic43_120228_06_15_20.tar file.

The output that is generated by the part command is saved in a .tar file, which is created in the current working directory. The naming convention for files in the on-demand monitoring mode is short-hostname_yymmdd_hhmmss.tar. In the postprocessing mode, the file name is that of the input file with the file name extension changed from an .nmon file to a .tar file.

When you start the VIOS Performance Advisor tool in the postprocessing mode, you must provide a file as the input. The tool tries to extract as much data as possible from the file that you provide, and the tool generates reports. If the file does not have the required data for the tool to generate reports, an Insufficient Data message is added to the relevant fields. For example, to generate a report based on the data available in the ic43_120206_1511.nmon file, enter the following command:
part -f ic43_120206_1511.nmon
Reports for the postprocessing mode are successfully generated in the ic43_120206_1511.tar file.
Note: The size of the input file in the postprocessing mode must be within 100 MB because postprocessing of huge data results in more time to generate the reports. For example, if the size of a file is 100 MB and the VIOS has 255 disks that are configured, with more than 4000 samples, it might take 2 minutes to generate the reports.