A Peek at AIX From an “i Guy” (ok, Girl)

I've been working with IBM Systems Director quite a bit lately. Of course my main interests are the latest capabilities for managing IBM i with Systems Director. Because the IBM Systems Director Server does not actually run on IBM i, I've had the opportunity to get some experience within the UNIX world according to AIX.

Maybe I'm not as much of a computer geek as I thought since I find working with AIX more difficult than with i. Sure, I've not worked much with AIX before and my career has been i-centric. Experience and knowledge play a strong part in strengths and difficulties, but there are some things about AIX that I just don't get.

Let me list some of the challenges I've faced and some observations about them.... 

• The command line interface. It seems that we in the i-world are viewed negatively because we love our “green screens” - it's so easy to learn and use! Of course, the expectation today for end-user applications is different, but for administrative purposes, the command line interface is generally much more efficient; in the UNIX world, no one uses a graphical interface for system administration.
  
  Within two weeks of starting my job at IBM, I could figure out almost any command or figure out how to find it. The consistency of the command interface on i is so wonderful! Once you know a few of the command abbreviations, it's pretty easy to figure out what the command names should be or might be.
  
  The AIX command line interface frustrates me to no end.
  
  
• The two graphical user interfaces we use are IBM Systems Director Navigator and System i Navigator. They are used by many admins. AIX also has the IBM Systems Director Console for AIX. I've yet to meet anyone who uses it. The AIX administrative guys want their command lines not a GUI.
  
  
• Command help and prompting is brilliantly executed on i. AIX features dash-this-and-dash-that without consistency and I'm never sure if notation is mandatory or optional. I'd like to keep this observation within our community since AIX people would probably revolt if they knew how good we have it in this area. Also, man pages on AIX?
  
  
• Vi for editing.... And we think SEU is dated??
  
  
• Storage management.
  I'm not very knowledgeable about how storage is allocated and managed on AIX, but things can go wrong very quickly if you don't have sufficient storage allocated to a directory. Not enough storage allocated to /tmp, /var/, or /opt and you'll have problems. But why do I have to even care? There's plenty of storage available to the partition …. I really appreciate how i just takes care of the storage management for you.
  
  
• No job logs!
  ...but there are many log files. ...all over the place! It's so nice to have just a few, standard places to look for messages on i: QSYSOPR, QHST, and job logs. With second-level help on the messages, along with consistent information regarding the time and sender of the message, message logging on i makes diagnostics vastly easier and wastes less time.
  
  

Of course, my experience in the UNIX world is very limited, but the last few months have made me appreciate the ease-of-use and intuitive nature of IBM i.

It's perplexing how i gets a bad rap over it's terminal interface, but on AIX, it's viewed as expected. It's probably even revered, particularly if you are good at it... I don't quite get it.

Guess that's why I'm an “i Guy.”

 

Power Systems Technical University in Copenhagen

This week I've had the opportunity to attend the Power Systems Technical University in Copenhagen. The conference is held in in the Bella Center, with the conference hotel, the Bella Sky Cromwell Hotel, connected to it.

Since this is a Power Systems conference, the agenda covers Power hardware, AIX, IBM i, Linux, Systems Director, virtualization and other topics.

The keynote presentation was led off by Tom Rosamilia. Having heard Tom talk at other conferences, much of the overall message was the same; Tom talked about IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, Watson, the explosion of data and Power System's market share. There was one very interesting tidbit of information that Tom shared with the audience that I'm sure my i readers will love to hear – IBM i had a great 3^rd quarter with double-digit growth. That certainly brought a smile to my face!

At the Power Systems Technical University conferences, you generally find many more attendees that are interested in AIX as opposed to IBM i, and that was also true at this conference, but there was still excellent representation from our i clients. I gave the “IBM i Today, Tomorrow and Beyond” presentation that Steve Will often does and the room was full (and it was on the agenda for a second time and that too was well attended). It's a very busy week for me with 12 presentations. When I give a technical presentation I generally ask my audience what releases they are on. It was enlightening to see that there are fewer and fewer clients on 5.4 and more on more on 6.1 and 7.1.

One final observation I have is regarding the “Power Systems” branding and how that is a very good thing. The entire audience listening to the keynote heard about IBM i's double-digit growth. During some free time when I wasn't presenting, I took the time to attend some non-i sessions. In two of those sessions (one was an IBM Systems Director session, the other “SAN 101”), the speakers talked about considerations for IBM i as well as AIX. With Power, many things are common across all operating systems and it's exciting to hear IBM i talked about in places where in the past the focus was likely only AIX.

 

 

 

Suspend My i

Another IBM announcement day; there were several IBM i-related enhancements, one of which is Suspend/Resume, a feature of PowerVM that was already supported on AIX and Linux and is now available on i.

From the RFA:
PowerVM includes support for an IBM i 7.1 partition to be suspended, and later resumed. Using Suspend/Resume, clients can perform long-term suspension of partitions, which frees server resources used by that partition, and later resume operation of that partition and its applications on the same server.

Why might you be interested in suspending an i partition? There are numerous examples:

•    Free up system resources for other partitions to use.
•    Suspend workloads and applications so that hardware maintenance can be done, resuming the partitions later, thus starting up where they were running and avoiding a full IPL of each partition.
•    Energy savings; use fewer processors when the workloads aren’t needed.
•    Perhaps you have some long-running tests, but you'd like to save energy by not running those tests overnight; you could suspend the work and only run the tests during the day, without losing the work you've already done.


To use Suspend/Resume with i requires the following:

•    IBM i 7.1 with Technology Refresh 2 PTF Group
•    The logical partition must be configured to use all virtual I/O (i.e., the virtual I/O server is required and you must be using external storage)
•    The partition must be managed by an HMC or the newly announced IBM Systems Director Management Console (SDMC)
•    The partition must be configured to allow it to be suspended through the HMC or SDMC
•    The resume of the partition must occur on the same system on which the suspend was done

Control of suspending--and subsequently resuming--an IBM i partition is done through the HMC or SDMC as an interactive procedure. The operating system will validate that it’s in a state that’s acceptable to suspend.

A partition can remain suspended indefinitely. When you resume a partition, its saved state is restored and it will begin to function as it had prior to the suspend. There may be a burst of activity that occurs when a partition is resumed since it will appear to the system that the clock has been moved forward. Functions that are time-interval based may begin running immediately when the partition is resumed, while other functions will run when the next timer interval expires. 

The capability to suspend an IBM i partition is an exciting new enhancement. If you aren’t yet on the 7.1 release, perhaps this new capability (or one of the many other features announced) will provide the incentive to take a good look at 7.1.