A Tip on Getting Started with the PowerHA 7.2.1 GUI

Edit: Some links no longer work.

Originally posted November 7, 2017 on AIXchange

There are a lot of ways to get familiar with the new PowerHA 7.2.1 GUI:

In PowerHA® SystemMirror Version 7.2.1, or later, you can use a graphical user interface (GUI) to monitor your cluster environment.

The PowerHA SystemMirror GUI provides the following advantages over the PowerHA SystemMirror command line:

Monitor the status for all clusters, sites, nodes, and resource groups in your environment.
Scan event summaries and read a detailed description for each event. If the event occurred because of an error or issue in your environment, you can read suggested solutions to fix the problem.

Search and compare log files. Also, the format of the log file is easy to read and identify important information.

View properties for a cluster such as the PowerHA SystemMirror version, name of sites and nodes, and repository disk information.

More information is available in these videos from Shawn Bodily and Michael Herrera. And then there’s this virtual user group presentation.

I’m mentioning this now in part because someone recently asked me how to locate the fileset that’s needed to get it to work. While the requirements tell you what version of AIX you need to be running, they don’t tell you where to get the cluster.es.smui.server fileset.

For that, you need to go here and download the ESD_PowerHA_SystemMirror_v7.2.1_Std_Ed_122016.tar.gz archive. The package unzips into three directories: the installp directory, an smui_server directory, and a usr directory. While you might assume the filesets are in the installp directory, they’re actually found in smui_server. Credit to Shawn Bodily, who pointed this out to me. Be sure to keep this in mind as you do your own testing of the PowerHA GUI.