Edit: The first link no longer works, though this one looks similar. The publib link for mount options no longer works. The online course no longer works. I added the original ending back into the post.
Originally posted March 3, 2009 on AIXchange
Though I’ve yet to try running HMC code in VMware, it sounds interesting. I cannot count the number of times people have asked me if there’s a way to play around with HMCs and Power Systems servers before buying them. Relatedly, I often hear how difficult it can be to find a sandbox system to learn on.
If you’ve had success in this area, please share your experience in comments. From reading through the comments on the original posting, it looks like some people got it to work while others had issues, so your mileage may vary.
I occasionally post information like this to spark ideas and, hopefully, generate some discussion. With that in mind, here are some other links that should appeal to AIX professionals.
I’m always interested in things that people do with their hardware. I found that running Mac OS X on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was interesting as well.
These items were mentioned on a mailing list.
1) Thanks to LL for sharing this obscure gem:
mount –o log=NULL
DISABLES metadata logging. Performance gains are very significant. NOT a general purpose feature/option.
2) Thanks to Nigel G. for sharing this gem:
The AIX mount command has a “noatime” option. This avoids the need to update access times on files and can give you a considerable performance boost if you have lots of files being accesses.
More mount options can be found here. Feel free to share others that you think would be useful.
This online course offers some good reference information about the command line interface for the HMC.
A recent issue of AIX EXTRA, IBM Systems Magazine’s monthly e-mail newsletter for AIX professionals, featured this article that covers how you do things in AIX.
And finally, here’s a post I wrote about the consolidation of Power Systems running both IBM i and AIX.