Who's Afraid of Linux on Power, AIX and VIOS? Not i.

© HelpSystems. Company Confidential.All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Who’s Afraid of Linux on Power, AIX, and VIOS? Not i.Donnie MacCollDirector of EMEA Technical Services

© HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 2

Agenda

• Comparing IBM i, AIX/VIOS, and Linux Monitoring Requirements

• Is VIOS the Same as AIX?• Using Best Practice Templates• Do I Need to Throw Away All My Scripts?• Reporting


Comparing IBM i, AIX/VIOS, and Linux Monitoring Requirements


How Many Companies UseAIX and VIOS?

HelpSystems conducted the 2015 IBM i Marketplace Survey and the results are in!


What are the three most common itemsthat affect performance?

a) CPU, disk, and memory

b) Processors, ASPs, and memory pools

c) CPU, file systems (logical and physical), and memory

d) All of the above

The answer is D. Yep, they’re all the same!

Comparing IBM i, AIX, and Linux


• VIOS

• A mirrored disk or a raid disk becomes inactive

• QSECOFR or another powerful user profile is used or changed

• Java processes and webservers need monitoring

• An interactive job is using an excessive amount of CPU– Maybe an intensive SQL query

IBM i


• Applications are slow

• Know when powerful commands are used– For example, STRSST, CRTUSRPRF, and DLTLIB

• Cache battery is low

• A communications port or line is failing

• Uncapped processors exceed a pre-defined threshold

• Power fails or systems are being run on utility power

• QSYSMSG– Who uses it already?

IBM i


• Monitor and report on entries in the Error Report

• Check that critical subsystems exist and are active

• When disk mirroring is active, alert when Quorum is set to “on”

• For each file system, check when stale physical partitions exist

• Check for failed logins

AIX


• Monitor for disk I/O busy and sustained disk utilization

• Verify operational status of path to MPIO device(s)– hdisk0 & hdisk1

• Ensure critical files exist are alert if modified– For example, new entries in cron

• Monitor for disk usage, including inode space used

• Paging space should be relative

AIX


• Check logical volumes are available

• Check for failed drives

• Ensure vital files exist and have not been modified within a specific time frame period– For example, cron, profile, INITTAB, and iptables

Linux


• Monitor for login failures in secure log

• Check used disk space does not exceed threshold

• Ensure there is plenty of inode space

• Paging file usage should be relative

• Sustained CPU identified

• Ensure critical processes are active

Linux


Is VIOS the Same as AIX?


What Is VIOS?

Until recently, every partition running on IBM i required hardware such as disk storage and network connections dedicated to that partition.

This is inflexible and can be costly because of the hardware that is required for each partition. IBM has developed the Virtual I/O Server, which addresses these issues by acting as a host partition for I/O.

Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) is a logical partition (LPAR) that has physical I/O such as disk storage and network adapters connected to it.

This I/O is then provided to client LPARs running IBM i, AIX, or Linux within the same physical server.


Using Best Practice Templates


Solutions Portfolio


Why Re-Invent the Wheel?


Use Templates

• Write once, apply to many

• Consistent approach

• Ease of deployment

• Let’s look at some pre-configured templates


Templates Resources

• Guide to AIX VIOS Monitoring• Halcyon Guide to Templates

http://www.halcyonsoftware.com/guides/Guide-VIOS-Monitoring.pdf



http://www.halcyonsoftware.com/guides/Guide-to-Templates.pdf

http://www.halcyonsoftware.com/guides/Guide-to-Templates.pdf



Do I Need to Throw Away All My Scripts?


Existing Scripts

• Will Halcyon make our existing scripts redundant?

• Why use scripts?

• Let’s look at how we can harness the power of your scripts by using the flexibility of Halcyon


Reporting


Key Takeaways

1. There’s no need to be afraid of VIOS/AIX or Linux.2. The things you need to be monitoring on IBM i, AIX,

and Linux are similar.3. You can monitor VIOS or AIX without necessarily

knowing the operating system.4. You can enhance the power of your existing scripts

by embedding them into a point-and-click solution with instant alerting methods.

5. It’s easy to create SLA performance reports on the fly for capacity planning and management reporting purposes.

6. Halcyon offers built-in templates to monitor and keep control of critical processes and applications running on your AIX and Linux environments.


Contact Information:

Web: www.helpsystems.com/

halcyon

Email:

[email protected]

Phone U.S. 800-328-1000

Outside U.S. +44 (0) 870 120 3148

Thank You For Joining Us

Who's Afraid of Linux on Power, AIX and VIOS? Not i.

Software

Transcript of Who's Afraid of Linux on Power, AIX and VIOS? Not i.