Edit: Some links no longer work.
Originally posted August 20, 2013 on AIXchange
I wish I’d been in Manchester and London last month. Apparently I missed out on a great Power Systems event.
“The fifth POWER Ask the Experts is a one day customer technical event in the U.K…. It proved to be a very popular free event. We had well over a 100 people attend which was a mixture of customers, a few business partners and some IBMers.”
Even though I wasn’t there, I can at least download the slides. Pat O’Rourke gave a Power Systems update, Nigel Griffiths presented performance best practices with POWER7, Gareth Coates presented hands-on tricks of the Power masters, and David Spurway gave a cost comparison between IBM Power and Intel servers. The finale was an NDA session covering Power systems trends and directions, so obviously we don’t have slides for that one.
Although I may see some of this information at this fall’s IBM Power Systems Technical University conference in Orlando, I am sure some unique topics were covered at the U.K. event.
I do encourage you to check out the slides, because some of these tips may be new to you.
* For starters, by logging into your HMC and running any of these four commands, you’ll get detailed information about memory and disk usage, etc.
monhmc –r mem –n 0
monhmc –r disk –n 0
monhmc –r proc –n 0
monhmc –r swap –n 0
* Another HMC tip concerns disconnecting and reconnecting a managed system from the HMC. Run mksysconn –o auto to clear the connection history on your HMC before reconnecting the managed system. Run lssyscfg –r sys –F name in order to see which managed systems are attached to your HMC.
* To show the vios and vhost for a client VSCSI adapter, run:
# print “cvai” | kdb | grep vscsi | grep –v read
* Another VIOS tip: Don’t go into oem_setup_env to run commands on your VIO servers. Be sure to check out slide 20, which covers failures with creating system plans that may stem from messing around as root on your VIOS.
* From the same presentation comes the reminder that the $export CLI_DEBUG=33 command provides detailed information about the commands VIOS is running under the covers.
* This lshwres command provides all the WWPN on a system:
lshwres -r io –rsubtype slotchildren -m Server-9117-MMB-SN101509A –F
phys_loc,description,mac_address,wwpn,microcode_version |grep Fibre
* The DPO observations are also well worth a read. Here are some useful DPO-related HMC commands:
lsmemopt –m -o currscore
lsmemopt –m -o calcscore
optmem –m -t affinity –o start
* One must be careful with kdb, but if you want to see how many virtual processors are active, enter the following on the command line:
# echo vpm | kdb
* Finally, there’s a reference to the IBM Redbook, “IBM PowerVM Virtualization Managing and Monitoring.”
Of course there’s much more information than what I’ve shared here. Download the slides and see for yourself.