POWER9 Performance Best Practices

Edit: Best practices are always a great place to start.

Originally posted June 5, 2018 on AIXchange

In April, IBM’s Therese Eaton (@tetweetings) noted this availability of this POWER9 performance best practices document.

Along with POWER9 (and POWER8) best practices, there’s instruction on managing AIX updates and upgrading from Version 5.3 to 7.1.

While it’s only a brief checklist, there is important information here:

  • Ensure your firmware is current.
  • Follow the memory plug-in rules.
  • Ensure OS level is current.
  • Evaluate the use of SMT8.
  • Right-size your shared LPARs.
  • Use DPO to optimize partition placement.

Also covered are AIX and VIO server tunables, CPU utilization, VIO server configuration, and virtual Ethernet adapters.

The second page has links to virtualization best practices, rPerf reports, 100G adapter best practices, VIOS sizing, Java performance, VIO server advisor, and IBM Redbooks.

Particularly for those who are new to the platform, these resources can be a big help.