Adventures in systems land

One of the things I pushed for when I first joined Power Systems(then System p) was for the IBM redbooks to focus more on software stacks, and to relate how the Power Systems hardware can be exploited to deliver a more extensive, and easier to use and more efficient hardware stack than many scale out solutions.

Scott Vetter, ITSO Austin project lead, who I first worked with back in probably 1992 in Poughkeepsie, and the Austin based ITSO team, including Monte Poppe from our System Test team, who has recently been focusing on SAP configurations, have just published a new IBM Redbook.

The Redbook, Power Systems and SOA Synergy, SG24-7607, is available free for download from the redbooks abstract page here.

The book was written by systems people, and will be useful to systems people. It contains as useful summary and overview of SOA applications, ESB’s, WebSphere etc. as well as some examples of how and what you can use Power Systems for, including things like WPARs in AIX.

New Redbooks covering some of the key announcements from this week:

1. PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p Introduction and Configuration Fourth Edition - Draft(thanks to Monte and Scott for fixing up the title ).
2. PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p Managing and Monitoring - currently a draft.
3. Getting started with PowerVM Lx86
4. i5/OS Program Conversion: Getting Ready for i5/OS V6R1 - draft

Trying to find a reference book on AIX 6, I looked at the latest list of Redbooks for Power Systems, these are the ones listed in the RSS feed since the start of October 2007.

Continue reading ‘Catching up on IBM Redbooks’

I receive quiet a few emails weekly asking questions about product stratetgy and direction. Some of them are difficult to answer because they either delve into IBM confidential disclosures or are too complex to handle in email.

This one though was both interesting and bought back a flood of memories, I thought a post here was in order, with Dales permission.

Continue reading ‘Looking back, Unix System Services, Linux et al’

More from the IBM Redbooks team here in Austin. This time its an update to a prior book, actually this is the 3rd revision of the popular Introduction and Configuration book.

They’ve added and updated information on the following:
The value of the Advanced POWER Virtualization

• Virtualization technologies on System p servers
• New features in Version 1.3 of the Virtual I/O Server.
• Additional information for Virtual SCSI optical devices.
• Setting up the Virtual I/O Server: the basics
• Setting up virtual I/O: advanced
• Scenario 4: Network Interface Backup in the client
• System management
• Additional information about Hot Plugging adapters with respect to Fibre Channel.
• Additional information about the topas command
• New monitoring commands included in 5.5.6, New monitoring commands on the Virtual I/O Server.
• A new section on security: 5.7, Security considerations for Virtual I/O Servers.

The updated book is here and is available in PDF and HTML format.

More good/free stuff from the IBM ITSO, this time a redpaper on the System p APV Virtual I/O Server. The redpaper is some 90-pages and covers VIOS deployment examples.

Listed are some high-level architecture designs, referred to as scenarios. They show different configurations for VIOS and partitions. The scenarios described in this paper will help you derive your own implementation.

You can download the redpaper here.

Keith and Gerry both emailed me and both asked, in different ways, about getting some help on Advanced Power Virtualization. Today we announced a focussed services offering, but there are lots of other resources to help you understand and get started.

1. An easy place to start is this guided, no-charge, introduction presentation ? You can view online or download.
2. There are currently a set of 2-day “no charge training workshops being run in India, the US and the UK. Details here.
3. If you miss the workshops, or perhaps want to do a deep dive and get some hands on, as well as best practices, IBM Education offers a 4-day “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations” class AU780. IT is running eight times in 1Q07 in the USA. Details here.
4. For those who want to read, rather than attend, the ITSO as always offers a wealth of online reference material. There is material that covers the basics, the recent changes and enhancements, and a 10/06 Best Practices book. Search here.

Finally, if you would really feel more comfortable letting someone else do the work and learning from them as they do it, today IBM Services announced “IBM Implementation Services for System p — Advanced POWER Virtualization”, if you want to go down this route, you’ll need to talk to your IBM Rep.

In his Enterprise Architecture: Virtualization and Management by Magazine blog post, James McGovern muses on mainframe virtualization leadership and if the likes of James Governor and the 451 Group will start blogging about it. He also wonders if “IBM mainframes would make a better participant in a grid architecture than Sun, Dell or HP?”

It’s not clear where the link is to management by magazine, but the blogsphere is certainly a funny old world. Partitioning and virtualization is taking off in a big way and a few short clicks this is all back in focus. Continue reading ‘In search of partitioning’

IBM Director and the IBM Systems Director play an important roll in the future of managing IBM Servers and especially IBM System p. I’ve been a long term fan of the IBM Redbooks, and have written three myself, and co-authored or been a contributor to five or six others.

So, it was with some delight that I learned today they Redbooks people are trying a new idea. They are going to build a wiki on IBM Director. It’s an excellent idea, and you’ve done any extensive work with IBM Director, or if you are an IBMer in ITS or S&D who wants to learn more about Director and use the opportunity to create some real value, perhaps you might take part in an ITSO Residency to kick start the wiki!

One of the things I’m really interested in at the moment is the mapping of classic virtualtion to application virtualization. Think using logical parttions to run web services.

I’ll retrun to this topic a lot in upcoming blogs, to explore he technology and opportunites for my current project. In the short-term I’m focussing on the opportunities for IBMs’ WebSphere application server to exploit the full dynamic function of IBM System p, dynamic logical partitions. I needed to start by getting a better understanding of the structure of WebSphere and the interaction model between its’ different components. Having looked at a number of the product manuals, I came across this IBM Red piece, WebSphere V6.1 Technical Overview, excellent!