When performing your scheduled Maintenance of Server hardware, be sure to include a physical inspection of your ServeRAID battery. We have seen a number of installations where the ServeRAID adapter has failed due to either a depleted or defective battery. This has resulted in unscheduled outages and extreme high levels of stress.     IBM Retain Tip H001648 states: “ Users should install and monitor battery conditions using the IBM ServeRAID Manager application for the following IBM ServeRAID controller models: 4M, 4H, 4Mx, 5i, 6i, 6i+, 6M, 7k, 8i, 8k, and 8s. All have cache backup batteries of which the battery status can be checked on the controller properties Status tab.     Users should install and monitor battery conditions usin...

Looking for IBM's i5OS and OS/400 release support schedule?  Look no further.  Bookmark this link below. http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/i/planning/software/i5osschedule.html

Let's hear cheers for AIX 5.3! It was GA back on 8/13/2004. It's been a trusted workhorse in our data centers for over eight years now! Few operating systems can claim a track record and durability such as this. But, end-of-life for normal support is coming soon. In fact, it is about six months away.   This morning, I just had an email exchange with a customer regarding AIX 5.3, and the looming EOL date. This particular customer was somewhat caught off-guard that AIX 5.3 would be going EOL quite so soon.   The most current Releases are: AIX 5.3 TL12 SP5, AIX 6.1 TL7 SP1, AIX 7.1 TL1 SP1.   If you cannot leave 5.2 or 5.3, and wish to maintain support, it is allowed to run, fully supported, as a WPAR under AIX 7.1. Need more information?   http://p...

Yep - it finally happened, earlier this week.   AIX 7.1 TL1 - and oddly enough, SP1 for that TL was released on the same date, October 17th.   For the many of you that have been waiting for TL1 before beginning with AIX 7, this is your signal.

Continued problems exist with Version 7.7.3.   I have worked with three customers this week that had significant issues in production with this particular HMC Code. Fortunately, none of the customers experienced any downtime, merely anxiety and inconvenience.   If you have, or are planning to upgrade to HMC 7.7.3:   Get it to Service Pack 1 Get all available PTFs applied. (list below) Do not stay logged in to the HMC. Do your work and log out.   When I last spoke with a support rep, I learned that IBM is very aware of the issues and working on fixes to the remaining issues.   All that said, HMC 7.7.4 was released today. I will be applying that in our BPIC later this week. I'm hopeful that some of the bumps and bruises from 7.7.3 a...

It appears that a little problem developed with the normally-bulletproof backup commands, such as mksysb and savevg.   The way I read this, it appears you have to be doing something somewhat specific to get the problem to occur.   Review this for AIX 5.3: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/subscriptions/pqvcmjd?mode=18&ID=5577&myns=paix53&mync=E   Review this for AIX 6.1: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/subscriptions/pqvcmjd?mode=18&ID=5582&myns=paix61&mync=E  

Not all storage controllers are crated equal.  Review the details below for a measure of individual drive performance. Question: Do you know of a study of like 2.5” 10K drives against 3.5” 15K drives? (2.5” 10K 600GB vs. 3.5” 15K 600GB drives) I keep getting like answers, but no real documentation to back it up. Answer: Before I begin, I would like to point out that the disk drive is not 100% responsible for the performance of a storage subsystem. You cannot predict the performance of a storage subsystem by the drives alone. Meaning that two different subsystems, with the exact same drive type and count will provide different performance levels. The “secret sauce” is in the controller firmware, and how it handles the I/O’s from the host. This is how the DS3500 ca...

On August 17, the Fix Level Recommendation Tool (FLRT) greatly expanded the supported products list to more than 1,200 IBM software products. FLRT now supports Software Group products running on AIX, IBM i, Linux on POWER, z/OS, Linux, Mac OS, UNIX and Windows. FLRT provides cross-product compatibility information and fix recommendations on IBM products. FLRT can be useful when you are planning to upgrade key components or you want to verify the current health of a system. www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/flrt/

While setting up Ganglia in our own lab, I created an AIX LPAR for the ganglia server. AIX Version 7.1 0.5 Power 7 CPUs virtualized as two CPUs 1GB RAM Modest resources, at best, and I was hopeful it would be sufficient for my needs.   After having it up and running with: Ganglia Client (reporting its own characteristics) Ganglia Server Ganglia Web Agent NFS Server A persisting 10MB/second file copy job across NFS CPU charts indicated to me that I had over-powered the LPAR by well over 100.0%. I used Dynamic LPAR tools to decrease CPU core to 0.2 Power 7 CPUs, while keeping the resource virtualized as two CPUs to the operating system. Looking five minutes later at charts I realized that this was a well-done trimback of resources, and the system w...

Ganglia, an open source monitoring solution, can be used to easily monitor many large AIX High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters and a group of logical partitions (LPARs) on a single machine. Summary of Ganglia capabilities: Monitor many large AIX clusters to monitor performance across large clusters of machines. Data is displayed graphically on a website, includes configuration and performance statistics. Monitor a group of logical partitions (LPARs) on a single machine - these just look like a cluster to Ganglia. Not just limited to AIX, which makes it useful to heterogeneous datacenters. Ganglia Graphs and How To Ganglia Home Website Ganglia for AIX and Linux on POWER Binaries Contact thinkASG for assistance with installing and configuring the Ganglia monitor...