Category: Technical Articles
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Masterclass: Using the Storwize CLI for repetitive commands
In my last article I introduced you to running some basic commands on the Storwize CLI such as lsvdisk and lsmdisk. I also showed you how to use the -filtervalue command to display a subset of items. Quite often, we want to execute a specific operation on a selection of items. So in this article…
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Exclusive preview: How Windows 10 works with Power i
With the release of Microsoft Windows 10 looming, I thought it would be a good idea to go through how this new desktop operating system will interact with IBM i Power Systems. As my company is a Microsoft partner, we had the opportunity to review the Windows 10 Technology Preview. For this article, testing was…
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How to speed up your IBM i backups
With the ever increasing pressure to get more from our existing infrastructures, many of you will be under pressure to extend the working day of your companies’ IT systems. This means that scheduling regular downtime to perform appropriate backup is becoming more and more of an issue. There are of course several solutions that allow…
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AIX tech tip: a tribute to AIX devices
When you have a device connected to AIX, such as a disk or a tape drive, you can discover it using cfgmgr. As you’d expect, it will have the default parameters that are used for the device driver. Sometimes you’ll want to change these parameters – usually to allow you to tune the device for…
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How to use the SVC/Storwize CLI
Over the last five years, I have worked with both SVC and the Storwize Vxxxx family of products with IBM i and AIX on Power Systems. SVC and Storwize share the same software stack and GUI. There are some functions which are only available in SVC but, predominantly, the configuration and management is the same.…
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AIX tech tip: How to scan new devices with a single command
There are things I really love about virtualisation for Power Systems. I probably appreciate some things more than other people do because I got to see how things used to work many years ago. A combination of physical and virtual enhancements has made life a lot easier than it used to be. I remember when…
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Five reasons to love your Hardware Management Console
For a while, I’ve noticed that most IBM i sites that have Hardware Management Consoles (HMCs) don’t seem to show them much love. In fact, in many cases I would go as far to say that they actively go out of their way to ignore them. If you have an HMC, ask yourself one question.…
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How to get started with PHP on Power i
Why would you choose to start using PHP on your Power i? Well, if you are thinking of delivering applications in a browser – either on a desktop PC or mobile device – PHP is an ideal choice. It is built for the web. In fact, vast swathes of the web are written using it.…
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Why you should embrace CL’s new features
From the AS/400’s launch in 1988 through to V5R3 in 2004, IBM made no enhancements to CL programming. We thought we were burdened with the same CL forever. We were stuck with restrictions like only being able to open one file in a program or the inability to use printer or ICF files. We couldn’t…
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VIOS: How to create multiple virtual disks in a Shared Storage Pool
I recently installed a Power8 system with VIOS 2.2.3.4 and used this opportunity to configure a Shared Storage Pool (SSP) cluster. I needed to allocate around 34TB of storage space across 2 x IBM i LPARs which necessitated me creating 245 x 140GB virtual disks. While the simple option is to use the HMC GUI…
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How to take advantage of the new, smaller IBM i 7.2
With the release of IBM i version 7.2 Technology Refresh 1, Big Blue has reduced the size requirement for the load-source disk for virtualised storage implementations. “So what?” I hear you cry. “All my disks are physical, they are bigger than 70GB and have been for years. What’s the big deal?” Well, for production workloads,…
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Masterclass: advanced vSCSI disk monitoring (includes scripts)
In my previous article, I showed how you can use nmon in VIOS to display the performance statistics of hdisks that are mapped to client LPARs. This is achieved by creating a file which nmon reads and then displays the relevant performance data. The script I used required that the virtual target devices (VTDs) mapped…