Daily news about IBM Power Servers

Where does ensuring your business remains on supported hardware and operating sit on your list of priorities? Most IBM i shops now have multiple partitions, some have tens or even hundreds, and so both operating systems upgrades and Power System refreshes can be major exercises, often involving downtime and buy-in from the business.

Let’s talk about #ibmi #cloud with a roundtable of IBMi experts. Join us this Thursday.freschesolutions.com/events/power-1…- Kimberly O’Dea (@KimberlyODea1)11:18 – Dec 05, 2022

Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program. 7.5 7.4 7.3 7.2 7.1 6.1 V5R4 Cumul Pack 22104 22125 22132 21084 17192 15063 12094 Tech. Refresh 1 7 13 9 11 – – Grp Hipers 17 94 171 223 284 210 204 DB Group 3 23 32 27 43 33 33 DB2 Mirror 3 21 – – – – – Java Group 3 16 27 37 48 41 34 Print Group – – – 3 13 31 49 Backup/Recov. 5 35 60 78 75 61 57 Blade/IXA/IXS – – – 1 16 30 15 HTTP 4 24 41 51 53 46 36 TCP/IP 1 8 12 13 11 17 22 Security 11 42 82 114 110 60  33 High Availability 2 11 19 21 18  5 Hardware – 2 18 35 44  17 Open Source – – 6 6 6 – The easiest way to check your levels is to issue the command WRKPTFGRP. They should all have a status of installed, and you should be up to the latest for all the above, based upon your release. Now there are more groups than the ones listed above, but these are the general ones that most people require. We can help you know which group PTFs you should be installing on your machine based upon your licensed programs. Here is a nice tidbit. The Cumulative PTF package number is broken down as YDDD, where Y is the year and DDD is the day it was released. Therefore, if we look at the cumulative package for 7.3, the ID is 21245. We can determine that it was created on the 245th day of 2021, which is September 2, 2021. Look at your machine and this will give you a quick indication of just how far out of date in PTFs you may be. HMCs Fixes are listed below in the order in which they should be installed for each software version. If you are upgrading to a new release, install the base version from recovery media or network image and then apply updates in the order listed. If you already have fixes applied and your current fix level is not in this list, just start with the next higher-numbered fix pack in the list. Be sure to read the release … The post IBM i, FSP, and HMC release levels and PTFs (November 2022) first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

We have had many customers asking us this year, especially since the announcement of the Power 10 systems when we expect IBM to announce End of Support (EOS) for the Power 8 Systems.  Up until now, we were unable to provide a response.  Now on the back of the EOS announcement of OS 7.3 effective 9/30/2023, IBM has provided the announcement that we have long waited for. On November 15, IBM formally announced End of Support for the beloved Power 8 Scale-Out and Scale-Up Systems. For the Scale-Out Systems, this takes effect on April 30, 2024, for the Scale-Up Systems, this takes effect on October 30, 2024.  For more information, you can read the US Announcement here:  https://tinyurl.com/2jvwrxrc With 60% of the Global IBM i installed base at Power 8 or below, this represents a significant Customer base for IBM that is affected by this announcement.  The intent of the announcement is to provide ample time for organizations to plan, strategize and budget to make their technology refresh decisions prior to the EOS date. There has recently been a significant increase in Hardware Maintenance (HWMA) costs and an additional increase is expected annually.  At the time of EOS, expect maintenance contracts to have annual price increases, and limited response times based on parts availability. This is also an opportunity to look at Third Party Maintenance providers, such as Service Express.  TPM providers provide a great alternative to OEM maintenance after the warranty period at a greatly reduced cost while providing superior service.  In addition, you’ll find that Service goes beyond the IBM i with maintenance that covers everything in your data center, wall to wall. Now is the time to properly consider your upgrade path from Power 8 to the newer technologies that IBM has invested heavily in over the years. Some of the options available are: IBM i In The Cloud – Cloud Hosting On-Premise Power 10 – Technology Refresh On-Premise Power 10 – Pay as you go Subscription Engaging with iTech Solutions, we will assist you in understanding your options, providing you and your management with the best technology solution and business case, as well as implementing the chosen solution for you. If your organization has a Power 8 or older technology system and would like to discuss your options regarding a technology migration or understanding extended maintenance, please reach out to your Account Manager or through … The post The Bell Tolls for Power 8 first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

There are several tools out there for measuring performance in Virtual I/O Server. However, there is one performance tool built in to VIOS that makes it easy to grab snapshots of performance and, at the same time, provide feedback on changes that could be made. The tool is officially called the VIOS Performance Advisor and ran by using the command part. When it comes time for the busiest workload on your system for the day, connect to each of your VIOS LPARs via SSH or the console and run this command:  part -i 60 -t 2 This will capture performance data for 60 minutes at a detailed level. At the end of the 60 minutes, a .tar file will be in the /home/padmin directory that contains all the files generated. Use your favorite FTP tool pull that file down to your workstation. To extract the files in the .tar file, I recommend pulling down a copy of 7zip to quickly pull out the contents. The contents of the file will look like this: The nice-looking report we want to look at is in vios_advisor_report.xml, but there is a catch  modern web browsers will not let you interact with the expand/collapse boxes in this report. Thankfully, there is a nice little workaround that will let you disable CORS for the purpose of viewing this report. For this example, I will use Chrome. Find your Chrome executable and create a new shortcut to it. Once you’ve created the shortcut, you need to make one little change. Go to the Properties of the shortcut and add the following to the end of the Target: –disable-web-security –disable-gpu –user-data-dir=~/chromeTemp Altogether, it should look something like this:  “C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –disable-web-security –disable-gpu –user-data-dir=~/chromeTemp Open up Chrome and in the URL, key in the location on your workstation where you’ve stashed the .xml file and hit Enter. Use this data to help do fine-tuning and detect any bottlenecks. More From This Month: The Bell Tolls for Power 8 Five Reasons Why Managed Security Makes Sense A Look at VIOS Performance Advisor How IBM i Invokes Your System Startup Program Watch Replays: iAdmin Fall 2022 iTech iTip Videos Sips & Tricks: Coffee with iTech iBasics: IBM i Education for the Beginner System Administrator Watch Replay: Tactical Security Day iPOWER Hour Episode 41: IBM i 7.3 End of Support and What It Means Upcoming Events IBM i, FSP, and … The post A Look At VIOS Performance Advisor first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

Dr. Sameer Shinde, Research professor from Oregon State University has delivered his presentation on Category servers used in Oregon State UniversityFrom: OpenPOWER AI , Cloud Virtual University

Mr. Peter Hofstee, professor from TU Delft & Research staff member, IBM has delivered his presentation on In-Memory Big Data for Power10 a personal perspective.From: OpenPOWER AI , Cloud Virtual University

Mr.Todd Rosedhal from IBM has delivered his presentation on LibreBMC and DC-SCM.From: OpenPOWER AI , Cloud Virtual University

Mr. James Kulina, executive director from IBM has delivered his presentation on OpenPOWER.From: OpenPOWER AI , Cloud Virtual University

OMG-OMG-OMG On the phone with @michaelquaranta talking PEP 2.0Power Enterprise Pools 2.0He is one of my #TechnologicalSuperheroes #NerdHerd #PowerVC #IBMChampion #FinTech #AIX #VIOS #PowerVM #Power10 #IBMi #IBMCloud #VUG #Linux #Unix pic.twitter.com/XBv1v0rhpq- The Iron Monger – Alan Fulton (@The_Iron_Monger)06:07 – Dec 02, 2022

Interesting new VIOS feature, “..monitoring the VIOS operating system state by the POWER Hypervisor. If the VIOS partition is not responsive…the hypervisor restarts the VIOS partition while it takes the system dump for debugging purpose.” ibm.com/docs/en/power1… #VIOS #AIX pic.twitter.com/NixXpqDLQF- Chris Gibson (@cgibbo)19:46 – Dec 01, 2022

IBMChampion Retweets (@IBMCRTWT) retweeted:Some good OpenShift announcements today.ibm.com/common/ssi/Sho… #NerdHerd #HMC #PowerVC #IBMChampion #FinTech #AIX #PowerVM #Power10 #Linux #Unix #RHEL #Power11 pic.twitter.com/zx93Lfn4HK- The Iron Monger – Alan Fulton (@The_Iron_Monger)09:15 – Nov 29, 2022

Also known as bringing a resource group online. In this demo the cluster services are already active on the nodes but the resource group is not online as it was brought down in another demo. I manually started it on it’s secondary node, just because I can.

This demo shows how to stop/bring a resource group offline using the PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX SMUI.

This quick demo shows how to stop a PowerHA SystemMirror cluster using the SMUI.

This quick demo shows how to start a PowerHA SystemMirror cluster using the SMUI.

The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan. Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle … The post IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward appeared first on IT Jungle.

New SAP HANA on Power Case Study:CENIBRA, Brazil, aims for super-sustainable paper growth: Increasing its share of a 200-billion-dollar market with end-to-end processes integration from IBM, SAP, and SUSE– Supports critical SAP solutions with five-times fewer servers than equivalent x86 platforms.– Enables up to 180x faster financial reporting. Digital Case Study: https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/cenibraPDF: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/B0QERZKD