More of us than ever find ourselves working on more than one system. There are a whole range of reasons for this. Quite often we have separate LPARs on the same physical server for Development and Production or perhaps separate physical servers for High Availability solutions to replicate our Business Critical Environments or maybe like […]
Creating and Mapping multiple LUs in SSP
If you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll know that I’m a big fan of VIOS shared storage pools (SSP). I have been lambasted by a number of IBMers for using SSP instead of NPIV but my arguments are: SSPs are fast and will cope with 95%+ workloads on Power Why continue to use […]
Are you using the correct disk driver for your Storwize storage?
With so many customers now using Storwize and SVC storage in their Power environment with VIOS, it is important that we get the configuration of the system correct and supported. In the last few months, I have been involved with customers who already have their Power and Storwize systems up and running. Something I’ve found […]
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. […]
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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
Masterclass: how to monitor VIOS vSCSI disk performance
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. Let’s look at a script I created to automatically generate the file […]
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 […]