IBM PowerVM II: Advanced Management and Performance

Students in this course will learn how to implement advanced IBM PowerVM features, such as Active Memory Sharing, Active Memory Expansion, shared dedicated processors, multiple shared processor pools, and Live Partition Mobility.

 Additionally, students will learn skills to implement, measure, analyze, and tune PowerVM virtualization features for optimal performance on IBM Power Systems servers.

This course focuses on the features that relate to the performance of POWER6 and POWER7 processors, AIX, and the special monitoring, configuring, and tuning needs of logical partitions (LPARs).

This course does not cover application monitoring and tuning.

 Students will also learn AIX performance analysis and tuning tools that help an administrator take advantage of shared processors and other virtualization features of the IBM Power Systems servers.

 Hands-on lab exercises reinforce each lecture and give the students practical experience.

The LPAR prerequisite skills can be met by attending one of the following classes or students can have equivalent LPAR skills.

• AN11 Power Systems for AIX I: LPAR Configuration and Planning

• AN30 Power Systems for AIX - Virtualization I: Implementing Virtualization

• Implement the deduplication feature of Active Memory Sharing

• Configure the Suspend and Resume and Active Memory Sharing features available with the Virtual I/O Server

• Configure and monitor Active Memory Expansion

• Perform a Live Partition Mobility between two Power Systems servers

• Interpret the outputs of AIX performance monitoring and tuning tools used to view the impact of features such as SMT, shared processors, additional shared processor pool activations, and device virtualization- Simultaneous multithreading (SMT), shared processors, multiple shared processor pools (MSPP), shared dedicated capacity, Active Memory Sharing (AMS), Active Memory Expansion (AME), Live Partition Mobility (LPM), and other virtualization features

Anyone responsible for the system administrative duties implementing and managing virtualization features on a System p server.

The audience for this training includes the following: 

• AIX technical support individuals 

• System administrators 

• Systems engineers 

• System architects

Day 1

Welcome

Unit 1: PowerVM features review

Exercise 1: Introduction to the lab environment

Unit 2: Shared processors and virtual processor tuning

Exercise 2: Shared processors and virtual processor tuning

Day 2

Unit 3: Configuring multiple shared processor pools and donating dedicated processors

Exercise 3: Configuring multiple shared processor pools and donating dedicated processors

Unit 4: Active Memory Sharing

Exercise 4: Active Memory Sharing

Day 3

Exercise 4: Active Memory Sharing (continued)

Unit 5: Active Memory Expansion

Exercise 5: Active Memory Expansion

Unit 6: I/O device virtualization performance and tuning

Day 4

Unit 6: I/O device virtualization performance and tuning (continued)

Exercise 6: I/O device virtualization performance and tuning

Unit 7: Live Partition Mobility

Exercise 7: Live Partition Mobility

Day 5

Unit 8: Suspend and resume

Exercise 8: Suspend and resume

Unit 9: Virtualization management tools

Wrap up/Evaluations