How To
Summary
Power Systems gain their massive performance with lots a technology this series details many of them.
Objective
Originally, written in 2012 for the DeveloperWorks AIXpert Blog for POWER7 but updated in 2019 for POWER8 and POWER9.
Steps
There is a great deal of advanced function in the Power Systems Firmware including the Power Hypervisor compared to other Platforms. These vital functions are key for system stability and performance and need to be professionally managed and regularly updated. If you take a Gaming PC, as an example, you might upgrade the firmware on first purchase of a Graphics card - that strategy for Power Servers would be "disaster waiting to happen" and on a production server a risk you should not take. It could even threaten your job.
The Hypervisor makes the virtual machine (LPAR) placement decisions and changes during DLPAR. The Hypervisor is part of the Power Systems Firmware. The larger POWER machines first arrived in 2010 (POWER7 and above). Since then IBM has many years of field experience with the larger machines with large configurations with large applications and tens of thousands of processes running and in particularly the machines with all three layers of memory. The are commonly called the Enterprise servers of the Power System range (Power 770, Power 780 and Power 795, E850, E870, E880, E950 and E980). From this experience, the POWER developers have refined the performance and VM placement algorithms, thresholds and tuning options. Some of this is reflected in the newer versions and service packs of AIX since the announcement, in particular AIX 6.1 and latest service pack (no longer sold) and any AIX 7.1 or AIX 7.2. But it is easy to forget or postpone the updating of system firmware (and Hypervisor) due to the outages this can cause. Of course, if you have gone for Live Partition Mobility (LPM) then system firmware upgrades are simple and easy to schedule!
Firmware Marketing
I would like to highlight that the POWER firmware developers don't have a marketing department. There are not many web pages, presentations or Technical University sessions with details of the new features or improvements in each release. You can read the "um" Readme Fix History but many "one line" descriptions there are vague. I could find no official website page describing CPU and Memory Affinity improvements in recent firmware level releases but from talking to developers I know there are lots and lots. These are in the areas of
Firmware Marketing
I would like to highlight that the POWER firmware developers don't have a marketing department. There are not many web pages, presentations or Technical University sessions with details of the new features or improvements in each release. You can read the "um" Readme Fix History but many "one line" descriptions there are vague. I could find no official website page describing CPU and Memory Affinity improvements in recent firmware level releases but from talking to developers I know there are lots and lots. These are in the areas of
- Concurrent hot add/repair maintenance firmware fixes
- Bug fixes for particular circumstances,
- Some performance tweaks including Affinity,
- More flexible way of handling Capacity Upgrade on Demand CPUs and memory to improve VM placement - a further reason to take CUoD
- Addition of new hardware
From knowing what is new in the latest POWER firmware and I have reread the "ReadMe" history - I can see them in the one line description but only because I know what to look for. I noticed some descriptions have the word "associate or associated" in them and a few with the word "performance". I never told you that - OK!
Best Practice
Once a Power Server model has been available for more that 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 1 year then every system admin person should then install the latest firmware level and (if necessary) upgrade.
Best Practice
Once a Power Server model has been available for more that 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 1 year then every system admin person should then install the latest firmware level and (if necessary) upgrade.
From then on yearly check.
I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE ALL POWER SERVERS TO BE UPGRADED TO A HIGHEST FIRMWARE LEVEL AFTER IT HAS BEEN RELEASE FOR 3 MONTHS.
Additional Information
Other places to find content from Nigel Griffiths IBM (retired)
Document Location
Worldwide
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Document Information
Modified date:
13 June 2023
UID
ibm11126731