IBM has rather quietly brought out a new interface to its Hardware Management Console (HMC). This became an option in V8R8.1 Service Pack1 of the HMC. IBM has called it the enhanced interface and you will have an option to select it at log in. Don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it. Before […]
How to monitor client LPAR vSCSI disks in VIOS
Many customers use vSCSI disk-mapping in VIOS to present external storage volumes to their client LPARs. There are proponents of vSCSI, NPIV and Shared Storage Pools. These all work very well. I find that AIX-minded technicians will lean towards NPIV because that’s what they have used traditionally. IBM i technicians will tend to use vSCSI […]
AIX tech tip: which HMC does this LPAR belong to?
In a large Power environment where you have multiple Power Systems and perhaps hundreds of LPARs, there may well be multiple Hardware Management Consoles. When the environment is spread across several sites, it can be a challenge even identifying which HMC to log onto to manage a particular LPAR. I recently had this situation. I […]
IBM i 7.2: How to look into the future with Batch Model
Continuing my recent system performance theme, the next IBM i 7.2 function I’d like to discuss is called Batch Model. Perhaps not the most descriptive of names but, mercifully, it is short. And, despite its name, it does in fact analyse all types of workload, not just batch. When I first heard about it, I […]
Masterclass: Creating an Etherchannel adapter for resiliency with VIO Server
An important aspect of VIO Server design is high availability and resiliency for your client LPARs. However reliable the equipment is, failures do occur and there is always human error. Etherchannel or LACP allows you to provide enhanced network availability and throughput for your LPARs by bundling a number of VIOS Ethernet NICs together to […]
IBM i 7.2: Finding the job that is killing your system
In my last article, I mentioned that it would be nice if there was tool that you could use to find the cause of performance problems on your system. I knew that IBM had been improving the Performance Tools that came with IBM i but I hadn’t realised just how much it had packed in. […]
Time-saving tips for AIX device configuration
When you have a one-off command to run on AIX, you just type it in. If you have to do it hundreds of times, you are better off if you script it. But what if the scripting still isn’t fast enough? I recently had to remove hundreds of virtual SCSI (vSCSI) devices from a Virtual […]
Masterclass: VIO Server networking tips and techniques
Over the past few years, I have picked up a number of tips and techniques to help when working with LPARs on Power Systems that use VIOS for networking. VIOS can provide highly performant, resilient and redundant networking capabilities to IBM i, AIX and Linux LPARs. While customers are comfortable with VIOS networking capabilities once […]
AIX tech tip: make friends with the VIOS command syntax
If you are familiar with running commands on AIX, you may have logged onto the Virtual I/O Server and found the syntax frustrating. For example, the following command on AIX will list disks: lsdev –Cc disk But when you’re logged into the restricted shell on the VIOS (usually as the user ‘padmin’), that will give […]
Exclusive: IBM i 7.2 delivers 17x performance gain with zero change
When Steve Bradshaw decided to test an assertion made in his previous piece for PowerWire, he made a rather pleasing discovery… In my last article, I mentioned how surprised I was that in v7.2 of IBM i, the SQL Query Engine (SQE) now supported Query/400 and Open Query File (OpnQryF). This simple fact meant that […]