Making a Good First Impression, Then Making It Last

Our guest blogger today is Kathy Tri, a senior software engineer at IBM Rochester who functions as the technical lead and architect for IBM i install, upgrade, license management and Power System upgrades. She shares insights and information about her team’s ongoing efforts to deliver an exceptional client experience. Read it, and then join the conversation on facebook.

A positive out-of-box experience for clients deploying IBM i has been a key point of emphasis from day one, and will continue to be in the future. Much is owed to the integration of the operating system with key functions, such as security and database, and with IBM middleware like WebSphere Application Server. We package and test everything together as a fully integrated stack to ensure the quick and easy deployment of an IBM i system or partition. As technical lead and architect for installs and upgrades, my goal is to ensure an easy migration to a new release with minimal downtime. The key objective for the IBM i operating system and its related products is to enable our customers to run their businesses without having to worry about the computer. A common thread among customers running IBM i systems is that they plug it in and leave it alone. It just runs with minimal intervention. This is what we had in mind when we developed IBM i support for what we call n-2 (n minus two) upgrades. For example, if an IBM i customer is currently on release V5R4, they can directly move to release 7.1 without having to install 6.1. This allows a customer to remain on a release for at least four years before needing to move to a new release. While it would be wonderful if customers could always remain current with operating system releases and technical refreshes, we know this is often not possible.

Since customers may have more than one partition or system, we also support interoperability between systems that are one or two releases apart. In other words, interoperability allows clients to develop applications on a current release and deploy them to a release n-1 or n-2. Another out-of-the-box feature is that most customer data can be moved from any prior release of AS/400 to the current releases of IBM i. For example, just the other day I was asked about moving applications and data from a V4R2 AS/400 to IBM i 7.1 on a new POWER7 system. Indeed, most of the data and applications will move with minimal reconfiguration needed. This is not a typical upgrade, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as an upgrade strategy, but it is an example of how we try to ensure investment protection and ease of moving to current releases and hardware. In this case, the customer will have the applications they love and will be able to gradually take advantage of new functions available.

Today we offer a number of tools to help plan the install or upgrade of an IBM i partition. For example, the IBM Pre-upgrade Verification tool for IBM i ensures that key items have been completed before upgrading the operating system and related products. To allow for remote install and eliminate media errors, we encourage downloading your entitled software and license keys from the Entitled Software Support (ESS) site.

Once the media images have been downloaded, you can use the resulting image to upgrade or install a new partition. In addition, network install allows for remote install from a single media image, which makes it easier to deploy the release. If you want a good reference for this capability, download IBM i Network Install using Network File System. Meanwhile, the IBM i Information Center has complete information about planning and installing a new release of IBM i.

The virtual media, or network install, was very beneficial for an IBM i customer who had a system that was older than  five years. They wanted to move to a current release to take advantage of some new application modernization functions. Their dilemma, however, was they didn’t know where the physical box was anymore! No one had needed to do anything with the physical system for a few years and the building they were in had been remodeled. They were wondering if there was any way to upgrade without having to physically load the DVDs into the system. Using the virtual media that was downloaded from the ESS website, they were able to upgrade the system without touching the physical box. They eventually found the system, it had accidently been walled over!

The out-of-box experience has always been key to IBM i customers. Our goal has been to provide them with an exceptional client experience that yields fast time to value. The influence of this “plug it in and go” capability has also rubbed off onto new POWER environments. IBM PureSystems takes it another step and optimizes the complete solution stack, combining advanced IBM hardware and software along with patterns of expertise. The result is an optimized configuration that is fully integrated and simple to deploy. The rapid deployment capabilities of these systems provide a simplified experience. Individual elements of your IT infrastructure need not be separately acquired. As a result, customers can focus on delivering business value. Sound familiar?

 

 

 

Integrate Web Services With DB2 for i 7.1

This week's blog article was written by Nick Lawrence. Nick works for IBM in Rochester, Minn., on DB2 for IBM i. His responsibilities include full-text search for DB2 and SQL/XML. Thanks, Nick!

The existence of Web services creates the potential to unite the data from remote sources with the data that is stored locally in a relational database. For customers who have not yet upgraded to the latest technology updates of DB2 for i 7.1, integrating a Web service with DB2 for i might be complicated. A combination of non-SQL and SQL code is usually needed to send the HTTP request, and also to construct, interpret and process the messages that are exchanged between the client and server. These infrastructure-related details are not what most developers want to spend their time on; the more desirable option is to focus on using the Web service as a tool to understand and process the business data.

Utilizing a Web service is a lot easier with DB2 for i 7.1 because of two important features:

1. Built-in XML support
2. HTTP user-defined functions (UDFs) in the SYSTOOLS schema

Both of these features are available in the DB2 for i PTF group SF99701 level 23. A portion of this support also exists in previous PTF group levels; however, IBM recommends that customers always load the most recent updates to get the latest enhancements and fixes. An additional requirement is that the HTTP UDFs require Java 1.6 or later (5761-JV1 Option 11, 12, 14, or 15) in order to run.

The built-in XML support is important because XML is commonly used for sending and receiving information between clients and Web services; thus, being able to process XML within SQL is extremely helpful. The integrated SQL/XML support that is available in DB2 for i 7.1 is a significant improvement over the non-integrated XML solutions for DB2 for i that had to be used in previous releases.

The sample HTTP UDFs in SYSTOOLS allow developers to access Web services from SQL, without having to write their own special purpose code or tools. The functions are samples, meaning that they are not covered under the IBM service agreements. Some customers will use the functions in their final solution without change; other customers will design and implement their own tools that do exactly what those customers need. Customers who build their own solutions still get an advantage in that the IBM-supplied tools can be used during the development of the application—allowing the development process to be more agile.

Be on the lookout for a "Part Two" i Can blog entry that will demonstrate an SQL query that uses the new HTTP functions and the built-in SQL/XML functions to convert data from a Web service into rows and columns. I expect Part 2 will be published in a few weeks.

For those developers who need an in-depth explanation of the new technology, the DB2 for i development team has published a whitepaper, Accessing Web services using IBM DB2 for i HTTP UDFs and UDTFs, that describes the HTTP functions in detail. In addition to the functions themselves, this paper provides several examples for accessing resource-oriented (ROA/REST) Web services, and service-oriented (SOA) Web services that employ SOAP as a protocol.

In addition to the whitepaper, a large number of resources are available for developers who are interested in this technology.

HTTP functions added to SYSTOOLS covers the announcement information.

For those who are familiar with DB2 for z/OS and DB2 for LUW, those platforms have delivered similar HTTP functions, and you’ll find information in the article, Accessing HTTP and RESTful services from DB2: Introducing the REST user-defined functions for DB2, on developerWorks.

The DB2 for i development team plans to publish an article specific to DB2 for i on developerWorks. This blog entry will be updated with a link when that article is available.

The DB2 for i development team has published an extensive amount of information on the SQL/XML support available in DB2 for i 7.1:

* The IBM i Information Center now includes an SQL XML programming guide.

* There is a tutorial for XMLTABLE in the previously mentioned SQL/XML Programmer's Guide, Using XMLTABLE to reference XML content as a relational table.

* See also my previous i Can blog post on XMLTABLE, i Can Use XML in a Relational World.

* See also a two-part general overview of XML and how to use it with DB2 for i:

XML Meets DB2 for i

Using XML With DB2 for i

* RPG programmers may find the RPG examples in this article, Using RPG to exploit IBM DB2 XML support, helpful.

* A whitepaper, Replacing DB2 XML Extender with integrated IBM DB2 for i XML capabilities, has been recently published that offers an extensive comparison between the built-in XML support and the XML Extender option of the DB2 Extender product (5761-DE1 and 5770-DE1). The paper illustrates solutions for common problems using the built-in XML support and includes several RPG examples.

* I have posted a short summary of the advantages that an integrated XML solution offers on Mike Cain's DB2 for i blog, Integrating XML – Past, Present, and Future.

XML is a complex topic. If you are looking for education or consulting, consider IBM Lab Services. The DB2 for i Center of Excellence team works closely with the DB2 for i development team and provides DB2 for i customers with exceptional training and consulting services.

Navigator for i Enhancements

You may remember the IBM announcement last October that included “IBM Navigator for i usability and performance enhancements.” Late in December, all of the required PTFs for this functionality were made available. However, the announcement information did not include all of the details of the new enhancements. If you take a look at the PTF cover letter of the IBM Navigator for i service pack update, SI47573, you will discover there are more enhancements that have been made than were included in the announcement information.

The announcement information covered the general usability and performance enhancements to the user interface – significant improvements have been made to the navigation with expandable sections in the left-hand navigation frame, which makes it more like System i Navigator. The usability and performance of tabs and tables have also been significantly improved. The Navigator for i page on the developerWorks site has additional information.

One area that had major enhancements that was not included in the announcement information was the Performance Data Investigator. The blog last fall, Performance Data Investigator – Better than Ever, reviewed those changes. The IBM i developerWorks site was recently updated with more information on these Fall 2012 enhancements.

If you read the PTF cover letter referenced above, you will discover that there are additional enhancements to IFS support, Disk Management support, OmniFind, DHCP and Database. Most of the enhancements are available for both the 6.1 and 7.1 releases and at the end of this article is a list of the PTFs you will need for each release.

I encourage you to install these PTFs if you have not yet done so and start using the latest features. You’ll be ready to explore the additional enhancements that I will write about in the upcoming weeks.

You need the following PTFs for full functionality. Note the PTF group levels listed below are the latest levels available as of the writing of this blog.

 

◦       IBM HTTP server for i group PTF (includes the java toolbox PTFs)
This PTF will provide the functionality you need for the Navigator console.

▪       7.1 - SF99368 level 17

▪       6.1 – SF99115 level 29

◦       Java group PTF
Since the Navigator function is implemented in Java, it's always a good idea to have the latest Java group PTF installed.

▪       7.1 - SF99572 level 12

▪       6.1 – SF99562 level 23

◦       Database group PTF
Many enhancements were made to the database capabilities so you also need the latest DB2 PTFs on the partitions you are managing. Performance Data Investigator enhancements for DB2 are only supported on 7.1.

▪       7.1 - SF99701 level 23

▪       6.1 – SF99601 level 28

◦       Performance Tools group PTF
The Performance Data Investigator enhancements also have operating system enhancements that are required; you will need these PTFs on the partitions you are managing.

▪       7.1 - SF99145 level 5

▪       6.1 – SF99144 level 6

 

 

 

IBM i Performance Frequently Asked Questions

IBM recently published an IBM i Performance FAQ. This document is a fantastic resource on all types of performance topics. It reviews the various components of system performance, discusses benchmarking, sizing and capacity planning, monitoring, and covers the performance tools that are available on i. The document has answers to many commonly asked questions and ends with an extensive list of references.

The IBM i Performance FAQ was put together by the Systems Performance team in Rochester, drawing upon the knowledge of leading experts on IBM i performance from the development team, the support center and Lab Services.

All IBM i administrators should read this document and it should be used as an initial reference for any performance-related questions. It is the single best place to start for anything related to performance topics on i.

The Performance management on IBM i Web page has also been updated to include a link to this performance FAQ. If you’re not familiar with the performance management site, it’s another great resource for information on performance topics.

Finally, the End-to-End Performance Management on IBM i Redbooks publication is a good reference for IBM i performance tools. Although it was written based upon IBM i 6.1 capabilities in 2009, the content of that Redbooks document remains current.

 

 

New System SSL support

This blog was written by Tim Mullenbach.  Tim is an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Rochester. He has been a part of the IBM i sockets/SSL development team since 1995 and leading the team for the past eight years. He has worked on designing, implementing, and testing various socket and System SSL enhancements for the V4R2 through V7R1 releases.

Hopefully you noticed the recent messaging for IBM i 7.1 TR6 which included the statement “Latest industry standards of Transport Layer Security version 1.2 (TLSv1.2) and Transport Layer Security version 1.1 (TLSv1.1) protocols implemented.”  

In my conversations with customers I find that many do not realize that TLS is the “new” name for SSL.  And by new, I mean for the past 14 years.  SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and was created by Netscape a long time ago.  TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and was created/designed/defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1999.  IETF standardized and improved the SSLv3 specification making TLSv1.0. While technically called TLSv1.0, many times the .0 was left off leaving TLSv1.  Implementers assumed the next version would be TLSv2.0 since SSLv2 preceded SSLv3.  No such luck – the next version was called TLSv1.1 with the one after that called TLSv1.2. 

Unfortunately the vast majority of people still call the entire concept SSL.  It can make for confusing conversations as people like me try to interpret what SSL means in any given context.  In all likelihood it is both SSLv3 and TLSv1.0 being described by the use of SSL.  A level of uncertainly always remains however due to a handful of applications that still only support the SSL protocol version known as SSLv3.  And for the few of us that call it all TLS instead of SSL, we lump SSLv3 under the term TLS.

At this point you might be asking, “Thanks for the name game and history lesson, but what does new support mean to me and my business?” 

IBM i and its precursors have supported TLSv1.0 (SSLv3 and SSLv2 too) at least back to V4R5 days.  As of Feb 2013 with the release of IBM i 7.1 TR6, we have support for TLSv1.1, defined by RFC 4346 and TLSv1.2, defined by RFC 5246.  Each successive version of the SSL/TLS protocol corrects issues found with the previous version and improves upon the state of the art.  The latest version available should be used to obtain the highest level of security available for TLS/SSL.

There is a catch though, nothing can be simple.  From 1999 to 2005 almost every application, work station, and intelligent device in the world had SSLv3/TLSv1.0 support built into it.  The vast majority of those devices still work, perform business critical transactions, and have zero ability to be enhanced with newer TLS/SSL protocols.  This significantly impacted and is still impacting the roll out of TLSv1.1.  With TLSv1.2 defined so close to TLSv1.1, TLSv1.1 became a lost protocol version.  TLSv1.2 adoption initially suffered for the same reasons.  The difference is that TLSv1.2 is more of a game changer than TLSv1.1.  Sure TLSv1.1 protects from additional attack vectors than the previous protocols did, but other workarounds existed to limp along without it. 

So what is the big deal about TLSv1.2?  Besides all of the incremental improvements, its big selling point is that it uses the SHA-2 hash algorithm instead of SHA-1 and/or MD5.  This is important because of NIST 800-131a.  You won't see SSL or TLS mentioned by name, yet when pieced together the recommendations lead to TLSv1.2.  NIST is playing the prediction game – how long will things secure today remain secure?  While you might have longer than the end of 2013 as predicted in that document, a wise security administrator would start transitioning to the new protocols and algorithms sooner rather than later.

The IBM i 7.1 TR6 enhancements make it easy enough to enable TLSv1.2 for your applications.  That is only half the story, the easy half at that.  Your communication partner also must support TLSv1.2 for it to be negotiated.  This ability varies greatly by application and the peer devices themselves.

For years client applications had no incentive to add TLSv1.2 support since the servers didn't support the protocol.  To make matters worse, a very small number of broken SSL implementations in the world fail when a client tries to negotiate TLSv1.2. 

It would be a good idea to enable TLSv1.2 for all of your IBM i 7.1 servers.  Then start work to enable TLSv1.2 in all of the client applications you have control over that connect to those servers.  It could take years, but once all of your clients support TLSv1.2, that should become the only protocol supported by the server.

The IBM i 7.1 client applications you use should also have TLSv1.2 enabled after verifying the server at least tolerates TLSv1.2 being requested.  Like with the server, once you know the server supports TLSv1.2, the older protocols should be disabled.

The unfortunate reality is that many applications must continue to support TLSv1.0 for years.  Some peer devices have no upgrade path to get new SSL support so you wait for the device to be replaced. 

Please read “How to use TLSv1.2 with System SSL on IBM i 7.1” on developerWorks for details on enabling TLSv1.2.

While overshadowed in the developerWorks article by TLSv1.2, the new application level cipher suite control is also very interesting.  For the first time ever, you can control the ciphers supported for the various IBM applications on an individual basis.  This means FTP, Telnet, and SMTP (client or server) can all use a different list of ciphers at the same time.  Gone are the days of taking a sledgehammer to the Secure Sockets Layer cipher specification list (QSSLCSL) system value in order to get an individual application to pass a security scan. 

This configuration option is available from the enhanced Digital Certificate Manager (DCM) application definition support.  To locate this support, select ‘Manage Applications’ and then ‘Update application definition’ from the left hand panel in DCM.  Once the application to update has been selected, the ‘Update Application Definition’ panel will display the new fields that can be updated.  Use these fields to control both the ciphers and protocols used by the application.  Refer to the panel help text for details on these configuration options as well as other additional System SSL properties now located on that panel.

New PowerHA SystemMirror Enhancements

This week’s blog was written by Jenny Dervin. Jenny is the technology leader for IBM i High Availability.

Last week, as part of the IBM i 7.1 TR6 announcement, we also announced several new enhancements to PowerHA SystemMirror for i. These enhancements will be available by the end of March via PTFs (SI48371, SI48522, and SI48540). All the changes will be available for the 7.1 release in every language currently supported by PowerHA.

Since PowerHA support for SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000 replication services was made available last year, many customers have also requested LUN or logical unit switching for those storage devices. With the upcoming PTFs, PowerHA will support LUN level switching for the SVC, Storwize V7000, and Storwize 3700 storage devices. PowerHA LUN level switching support requires NPIV (N Port ID Virtualization) attachment of the storage device, and thus requires IBM i TR6.

With LUN level switching, access to a single IASP can be switched from one IBM i instance to another. This protects against planned or unplanned IBM i or Power systems outages. Since it does not protect against disk subsystem outages or disasters, the LUN level switching technology is commonly used in conjunction with a replication technology such as Metro Mirror or Global Mirror. While Metro Mirror and Global Mirror are not yet available on the Storwize V3700, the storage team has issued a statement of direction that support is coming.

Another PowerHA enhancement is the completion of support for all functionality within the PowerHA GUI. The PowerHA GUI was PTFed into 7.1 last year and supported a subset of the functionality within the PowerHA licensed product. Now, the PowerHA GUI will support all of the technologies available in the PowerHA product, including all of the enhancements available in March. The PowerHA GUI contains wizards to help in creating an IASP and moving libraries and directories into an IASP, as well as configuration and management capability for a hardware based replication solution. The PowerHA GUI is available as part of IBM Navigator for i.

A new ‘Work With’ command to manage administrative domain is available. The Work With Administrative Domain Monitored Resource Entries (WRKCADMRE) command will make it easier to manage a large number of monitored resource entries (MREs). The entries can be sorted by name, typeor status, and it’s also possible to position to specific MRE names or types.

There are other enhancements included in the PTFs as well. We’ve made usability and availability improvements to our administrative domain, FlashCopy, and replication functions to work from any cluster node. We’ve improved the availability of adding and removing administrative domain MREs. For our customers using the geographic mirroring technology, changing the synchronization priority is now less disruptive. For more information on these enhancements, as well as links to other PowerHA resources, go to the PowerHA developerWorks wiki.

To keep up-to-date with PowerHA enhancements as well as fixes, we now periodically update high availability PTF groups for both 6.1 and 7.1. The 6.1 PTF number is SF99606 and the 7.1 PTF number is SF99706. These latest enhancements will be included in the next 7.1 high availability PTF group refresh.

 

 

 

IBM i Now Supports USB Flash Drives

I’d like to thank Jim Tilbury who is the lead of the IBM i removable media team for writing this blog article.

Last October, IBM i introduced Removable Mass Storage (RMS) technology with the RDX removable disk cartridge. The blog “Removable Mass Storage” reviewed that capability. Today, IBM is adding support to use USB Flash Drives as a second type of RMS technology. Flash drives can hold as much data as multiple DVDs and can typically access the data much faster. This allows a much more convenient way to move data (either IFS or save data) to another machine. IBM does not qualify nor recommended any particular device, but typical USB 2.0 devices from 2 to 32GB have been used in our testing. Performance varies from device to device, but ranges of 1 to 4 MB/S for IFS writes are typical. If a particular flash drive does not work, it may not comply with the USB interface specifications, and a different drive should be used.

The device appears to the system when plugged into a USB port that is configured to be in an i partition. Like RDX, it is an optical class device, and may be used with save/restore or with the QOPT file system in IFS. Because there is no eject button to remove media, users should be careful to not unplug the device when it is in use. The file system expects safe removal of media; for Flash Drives, this is done by varying off the device description, or logically removing the media with the RMVOPTCTG command (option 4 on WRKOPTVOL) prior to unplugging the device.

Once a configuration is active, the operating system will allow the same operations to change media as devices that remain operational when the media is removed. This means the configuration may be varied off and on when the media is removed, and the device will remain operational but report “no media”.

If a flash drive is inserted that has files on it, but displays on the system as unknown format, it is probably formatted with a file system that IBM i does not recognize (Microsoft NTFS, for example). When it is initialized on IBM i, it is initialized with the UDF file system. This file system is supported on Microsoft Windows-7, and files can be moved between i and Windows using this format.

If an IBM i 7.1 TR 6 partition owns the device it will have a device type of 63BC. An IBM i 7.1 partition is capable of hosting this device to another i partition that is at 6.1.1 or 7.1. On a client partition running IBM i 6.1.1 with current PTFs a flash drive will be detected as a device type 632C. On an IBM i client partition running 7.1 a Flash Drive will be detected as device type 63BC. There is no VIOS support for Flash Drives.

Save/restore operations are done just as with a DVD, for example SAVLIB DEV(RMS01).... Because it is an optical class device, you can also use IFS to manage data, e.g. WRKLNK OBJ('/QOPT/RDXVOL'). Commands are the normal optical storage commands (WRKOPTVOL, INZOPT, etc). See this article in the IBM i Information Center.

 

 

 

IBM i Large User Group

Last October, I received a phone call from my manager. Guy Havelick was going to retire at the end of 2012 and someone was needed to take over Guy’s work with the Large User Group. She wanted to know if I was interested.

The answer was an immediate and enthusiastic “Yes!”

I’m sure many of you have heard about “The LUG”. The IBM i Large User Group is an organization – a user group - of IBM i clients that have a significant use of i in their production environment. The LUG consists of about 100 companies; I can’t tell you who they are as membership is confidential information, but if you saw the list of companies, you would recognize many (maybe all) of them.

The Large User Group is independent of IBM and IBM is not involved in the membership process. IBM does support the LUG by participation in the meetings, planning the meeting agenda, addressing the requirements opened by the LUG members, supporting a website that LUG members have access to, among other things.

The LUG meets three times each year, with all of the meetings in Rochester, Minn. The next LUG meeting is the week of February 4^th. Yes – a meeting in Rochester in WINTER! That itself is a strong statement of the commitment to the i by this organization – clients from all over the world want to come to Rochester in the middle of winter for a user group meeting!

Each LUG meeting has a theme – typically the meeting will focus on a technical topic – such as systems management, performance or virtualization. Sometimes the meeting focuses on application development topics. But these meetings are much more than educational presentations – they are a collaboration between IBM and the LUG. Throughout all the meetings, IBM works together with the LUG to share trends and directions and future plans and to address questions and requirements the LUG has regarding IBM i and the related products they use. The LUG also puts together their view of the future in terms of a strategy and what they need from IBM looking forward. Of course, all LUG member companies must have non-disclosure agreements in place as a condition of their membership.

One of the major benefits of the meetings in Rochester is access to the IBM i development team. During LUG meetings, IBM developers give formal presentations, hold breakout discussions, give demos on the latest products, and have side meetings with the LUG members to discuss whatever topics are important to them. It’s this access to the development team that many LUG members value.

The Large User Group is always looking for companies to join the organization; they have a public Internet site at http://www.the-lug.com/. That website explains the membership requirements and expectations of a LUG member.

I do want to mention that the LUG is not the only organization that the IBM i team has a collaborative relationship with. Similar types of interactions occur with the COMMON Advisory Council, the COMMON Europe Advisory Council, and the ISV Advisory Council. Steve Will has written about the Advisory Councils – Requirements and Strategy in his You and i blog.

It’s very exciting to work closely with the largest IBM i enterprises in the world and I’m quite honored to have been asked to take on this role.

 

 

Commands to Manage Performance Collections

A few weeks ago I wrote about the various Performance Data Collectors in IBM i. It’s great to be able to collect such a wide variety of performance data, but what do you do when you want to manage that data? Maybe you have the need to do some analysis on a particular performance data collection, but you do not want to run the analysis tools (which have overhead) on your production partition. How do you move that collection to a different partition? Or maybe you are trying to develop a strategy for how to save (and possibly restore) your performance data; you never know when you might need a performance collection from a critical time period for comparison purposes if something goes wrong. Perhaps you simply want an easy way to delete some performance data that you no longer need.

Consider what a performance collection consists of: it may be data in a management collection object or it could be data in a set of database files. When the data is in the database files, each type of performance collection has its own set of files: 

• QAPMxxx for Collection Services
• QAPYJWxxx for Job Watcher
• QAPYDWxxx for Disk Watcher
• QAYPExxx for Performance Explorer

Each collection consists of a member with that collection name in each of the files for that collection type. Prior to 6.1, it was rather difficult to manage an individual collection of performance data.

In the 6.1 release, in addition to adding the Job Watcher and Disk Watcher performance collectors to the operating system, IBM also made it much easier to manage all of your performance data. The blog, i Can Find All my Performance Collections in One Place, described the Collection Manager – the graphical user interface for managing all of your performance data collections.

That blog made brief mention of the capability to copy, delete, save and restore performance data through the GUI.

The support behind the GUI is actually a set of commands that were added to the 6.1 release. These commands are: 

• Copy Performance Collection (CPYPFRCOL)
• Delete Performance Collection (DLTPFRCOL)
• Restore Performance Collection (RSTPFRCOL)
• Save Performance Collection (SAVPFRCOL)

All of these commands have a very similar interface and all of these commands can be used to manage any of the types of i performance data. You have to know the name of the performance collection you want to work with and the library in which it resides; you also have to specify the type of performance data you want to manage. You can select from the following (the default is *CSFILE):

• *CSFILE
  Collection Services file-based collections

• *CSMGTCOL
  Collection Services object-based collections

• *DWFILE
  Disk Watcher file-based collections

• *JWFILE
  Job Watcher file-based collections

• *PEXFILE
  Performance Explorer file-based collections

• *PEXMGTCOL
  Performance Explorer object-based collections

• *ALL
  All types of performance collections. This includes file-based collections and object-based collections. 

A bit of explanation is in order for “file-based” collections versus “object-based” collections.

When using Collection Services and Performance Explorer, data is initially deposited into a high-performing, highly scalability repository called a Management Collection object. The performance data can also be copied into a set of database files, which is required for analysis. The data in the management collection object is referred to as an “object-based” collection, while the data that has been copied into the database files is referred to as a “file-based” collection. You will note that for Disk Watcher and Job Watcher, no intermediate repository is used (the data is deposited directly into the database files), and as such, those types of collections only have options for “file-based” collections.

 

 

 

Performance Data Investigator

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Performance Data Collectors in IBM i; you can collect many different kinds of performance data, but once you have the data, what is the best way to view and analyze that data? Use the Performance Data Investigator. If you are on 6.1 or 7.1 you already have it.

The Performance Data Investigator was introduced with the 6.1 release and is found in the Navigator for i web console; it is not available in System i Navigator (and it will never be in System i Navigator).

Within the Navigator browser console, you will find the Performance tasks in the left-hand navigation pane. When you select the Performance tasks, you will see the following options:

The Investigate Data option is how you access the Performance Data Investigator. When you take the Investigate Data option, you will see something like the following image:

The initial list of perspectives shows you the set of content packages that are available; a content package is simply a grouping of perspectives for the same type of performance data. The Collection Services content package contains all the graphs and tables for Collection Services data. Which content packages you see depends upon what options of the Performance Tools licensed program product are installed.

You will always see Collection Services and Health Indicators; the capability to view and analyze Collection Services data is part of the base operating system and no other product is necessary.

However, if you want to analyze Disk Watcher or Performance Explorer data, you will need to have the Performance Tools product, Manager feature installed. To analyze Job Watcher data, you need to have the Performance Tools product, Job Watcher feature installed. Below is a screen capture of the Performance Tools product with all the options installed:

On the main Investigate Data panel, open the type of performance data you want to analyze – for example, you can expand the Collection Services folder to show the following navigation:

You can see that the list of perspectives (which is simply a fancy name for a graph or table) is organized by the type of information you want to see. You can further expand the folders to find the perspective you want to view. Once you have identified the view you want to see, you can display it.

Note at the bottom of the screen you have the capability to select which performance data collection you want to display, so you can have various performance data collections in different libraries.

Once you have identified the graph or table you want to display along with the performance collection you want to use, you display the data. An example of what a graph looks like is below:

The Performance Data Investigator has a wealth of capabilities; for a more complete article on the Performance Data Investigator, please refer to the IBM i Performance Data Investigator article on the developerWorks site.

Finally, here is a list of prior blogs with information related to the Performance Data Investigator:

Investigate Performance Data

Display CPU Utilization for all Partitions

Tell You Why You Are Waiting

Understand Scaled CPU Time

Measure Disk Response Times

Customizing a Perspective in PDI

Find All My Performance Collections in One Place

Job Performance Information

Performance Data Collectors in IBM i