Since HMC firmware version 7.7.7, IBM added very cool feature, which allows installation of the Virtual I/O Server directly from the HMC. This is very convenient when you get your POWER machine to the new location, and you want to install an operating system, for instance, IBM i or AIX, but you prefer to do it remotely.
Continue reading “How to install any Operating System on POWER remotely”
October 6th IBM introduced two new enterprise servers. Let me briefly highlight the most important features.
Continue reading “Power E870 & E880 – my few words (update)”
Hi,
Nowadays, I’m preparing for huge hardware delivery. I’m about to get dozen of MMD’s. The challenge is to configure them (LPAR profiles, VIOS, etc) as soon as possible. I found the way how to automate creation of multiple VIO/LPAR profiles including I/O configuration for multiple servers without knowing SN of the expansions drawers.
Continue reading “Building multiple LPARs with dedicated I/O from the CLI”
One of the biggest and the most spectacular news which I’ve experienced on my last residency, was the completely new technology called Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI). I was in big shock after a meeting with with the project leader. It sound for me as the holy grail for all I/O bandwidth and latency problems.
Finally the announcement day arrived. POWER8 and SR-IOV have been introduced to the world, and I can share my experience from my last residency.
Single Root I/O Virtualization are not new adapters, but this is a new technology, standard, specification. In fact, it uses adapters which are on the market for some time already. Specification allows to get a slice of a physical adapter and assign it an LPAR. This feature requires a proper hardware, firmware, and all elements around it.
Continue reading “SR-IOV technology on POWER – my few words”
Few days ago, I came back from IBM in Austin. It was my first time in Austin, homeland of POWER systems, chips, AIX and PowerVM development, but third residency in general. Continue reading “Redbook residency – Austin 2014”
The title is provocative, but if we agree that Virtual I/O Server is part of the POWER Hypervisor it’s absolutely true. The command viosvrcmd is a HMC command which allows to perform any non-interactive VIO commands by a HMC user which has the taskrole authority – ‘VirtualIOServerCommand’ and visibility to a VIOS LPAR without be prompting for VIOS user and password.
It’s important to know a CPU capacity used by a system. In IBM i world, we have a licpgm – 5761PT1 Performance tools. But what if you run other OS’s than IBM i, on the same POWER box. Or you run LPARs in different shared processor pools ? The most efficient might be tracking CPU cycles dispatched by the POWER Hypervisor. In this post I show you, how to interpret performance data collected by a HMC, and how to allow IBM i collects and display dispatched CPU cycles.
Continue reading “Monitor CPU, POOL utilization from PHYP cycles”
In a Redbook I found a pretty serious discrepancy about disk drive location, if you run a triple split backplane. Continue reading “Triple backplane – discrepancy between Redbook vs offical doc”
It’s just a heads up how to configure a P7 hardware, if you want to have a triple split backplane.
Continue reading “Triple Split Backplane – hardware configuration”
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