The experiences of an SMB IT technician
Archive for the ‘IBM i’ Category.
The Midrange Wiki is a good way to get started with the IBM i platform. I’ve started writing a short Getting Started guide there, which may be of interest to you.
If you work on the IBM i platform, the Midrange Mailing Lists may also be a place to visit and subscribe. Also, check out the IMHO Midrange Blog.
The IBM POWER Model 520 9407-M15 or in short the M15 is a one core, 4.2 Ghz POWER6 server.
It’s the successor of several System p systems (which i know nothing about), and of the System i Model 515 (9407-515). As such, it targets small businesses.
Yesterday i received the first M15, to be installed in for our SaaS (Software as a Service, the IBM Slang for Application Service Provider) Project. This is the first standalone POWER System that i got my hands on, but i’ve already tested running IBM i on Blades.
The M15 is a standard 19″ 4U Server at half depth that can hold dual power supplies for redundant power, has a variety of expansions slots and supports up to 6 internal 3.5″ SAS Disks. The integrated SAS RAID Controller has support for a battery backed write cache. You can also install several PCI-X and PCI-E cards. The system has 2 8x PCI-E Slots, one 16x PCI-E Slot and two PCI-X slots.
In this case, the system came with a HMC – a normal System x3550 configured with a single 320GB SATA Disk drive. Interestingly, we had ordered the same HMC (7310-CR4) half a year ago. Back then, it shipped with a 80GB SATA Drive and an external modem. This unit shipped with increased capacity in the SATA Disk drive, and an internal Modem. Though i have no idea why anyone would still use the modem.
The HMC isn’t very interesting from a hardware perspective either, so the focus is purely on the M15.
The first view on the front shows a new green bar, that symbolizes POWER6. I think it could use a bit of improvement, doesn’t look that nice. Much more interesting is that the control panel has essentially vanished. Like the light path diagnostics model in the System x, it has to be pulled out from the System to be of any use. This was probably done to save space.
The new control panel isn’t an improvement, unfortunately. Of course on systems with the a HMC attached you don’t really need it anymore – but most of the Systems we are going to ship will not have a HMC. The buttons are hard to use and hard to reach – it’ll be interesting doing procedures like 65+21 on those. This isn’t a deal breaker – but from IBM i expect them to get even details as this right – all in all, this isn’t a 1k Dell Server – it’s a 20k High-End IBM Server.
Much better in my opinion is that with the POWER Systems, the IBM i has finally moved to the year 2008 in regard to IO technologies. PCI-E and SAS is finally here. What i do not understand is why the M15 uses 3.5″ SAS Drives, and not 2.5″ SAS Drives. This would allow to fit more arms into the same chassis. e.G. the 2U System x3650 ships with the possibility to install up to 8 2.5″ arms. A 4U machine could have up to 16 arms – without needing more space.
The power supplies have been moved to the front of the unit, similar to the PCI Expansion units. I like it – the new power supplies are bit smaller than the older ones, and replacement is easier, thanks to them sitting in the front.
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The machine internals still seem a bit sketchy to me. The M15 wastes a lot of space that is used for the second CPU in larger machines. But it also has a completely new fan design, with four centrifugal fans in the back of the machine.
The new fan hot plug mechanism is very sturdy, and is comparable to the high quality fan design used in the System x3650. This was one of the biggest downfalls of the POWER5/5+ 520/515/525 hardware platforms that has been fixed in the new hardware. RAM accessibility still isn’t optimal in my opinion – you’ll still need to remove the fans to access the memory. IBM has better solutions for this – just look at the x3550 and x3650.
The fans are very, very loud. The unit we have here is a rack unit and the fact that there is no conversion option like for the POWER5 models might mean that the tower and rack units have different acoustic configurations or different dampeners. While loudness is a complete non-issue in a server room, smaller customers sometimes have the machine in their office. As soon as i get the first tower model i’ll write about their loudness level.
One of the things that’s completely new to the POWER platform is the HEA – the host ethernet adapter. It allows to share a physical NIC with other partitions – that’s a very good feature, but i wasn’t able to play with it yet – this machine is not partitioned.
The BBWC in this machine is now hot pluggable. It’s great to see this, but in my opinion it wasn’t really necessary. There’s a reminder directly on top of it that you need to set the disk cache into an error state before replacing it – and that reminder is very important. If you don’t pay attention to it, you might have to make an unexpected test of your DR strategy.
The expansion and console capabilities of the M15 are artificially restricted – you can not have a PCI-Expansion Unit (no HSL/12X Ports) and you cannot have IOPs in the base unit. The conclusion: No Twinax, No U320 Tapedrives.
Especially the Twinax bit is, in my opinion, a good move. It will force customers stuck in the AS/400 days to get current with all their other hardware like printers. On the other hand, it might also cause those customers to stay stuck with their model 270 or model 800. As for me personally, i’ll have to deal less with Twinax – which has to be a good thing.
The Thin Console, a very good option for Small Businesses, is gone (because HP bought Neoware). With Twinax also gone you now have the choice to either get a HMC for 6k or get a Windows PC and use LAN Console. Both options aren’t really what a Small Business needs – a console that “just works”. The TC and Twinax console fit those criteria. The LAN console has issues on their own (The whole Systam i Access package is … aging) and the HMC requires a boatload of expertise that SMB operators just don’t have. We will go with the LAN console, mainly due to the HMC pricing, but i’m not really content with the console situation on the new systems.
This picture shows the rear of the unit, as you can see the cabling in my lab environment is always top notch. The HEA offers 4 ports by default, a bit much for a standalone system. I’ve implemented a Virtual IP Address setup to create redundant network connections. Not as cool as native Teaming/Bonding support, but it works well enough.
In general, the new model has improved several things on the old hardware, left one or two things in the same state, and has two new issues (the control panel, noise level). All in all, a good solid deal of hardware.
Questions? Comments?
Disclaimer: These are my personal experiences, not a “How to i on Blade”. If you’re looking for decent i on Blade documentation, look at the i on Blade Readme.
Finally, after almost two months i was able to get my hands on a SAS cable with the correct pinout to connect the TS3100 library to the SAS Connectivity Module. After plugging in the cable, both link lights went up. The TS3100 was connected – physically at least.
I logged into the Storage Configuration Manager, and dared to assign the HS21 Windows Blade and the JS12 Blade to the external SAS Port. When looking at the Windows Device Manager, it immediately recognized the Tape Drive, but didn’t recognize the media changer. No bummer, i haven’t installed BackupExec yet.
It’s important to notice that the IBM i OS will not see your tape drive. You cannot connect the tape drive to the IBM i OS, only to VIOS. This means that you always will do a disk to disk backup to the VIOS partition, and then use VIOS to save the D2D Image to tape. Restoring works the other way around – you restore from tape to VIOS disk, then load that disk into IBM i, and then run your restore or even IPL from the virtual optical medium.
This is not optimal, as this means that you cannot use BRMS to manage media (you can still use it for saving, though). It also adds another layer of indirection that makes automating backups more difficult. Another important point is that other i machines will not be able to read the VIOS created tapes, and that your i Blade will not be able to read tapes created by standalone POWER machines running IBM i.
So i went to logon VIOS, running on the JS12 blade. I ran “lsdev | grep rmt0″, but apparently there was no tape drive to be seen. I ran “cfgdev”, to let the operating system configure devices, but that wasn’t met with success either.
This time, i chose the easy way out. I just rebooted the entire blade, and finally, the tapedrive showed up:
$ lsdev -dev rmt0 -attr attribute value description user_settable block_size 262144 BLOCK size (0=variable length) True delay 45 Set delay after a FAILED command True density_set_1 0 DENSITY setting #1 True density_set_2 0 DENSITY setting #2 True extfm yes Use EXTENDED file marks True mode yes Use DEVICE BUFFERS during writes True res_support no RESERVE/RELEASE support True ret_error no RETURN error on tape change or reset True rwtimeout 144 Set timeout for the READ or WRITE command True var_block_size 0 BLOCK SIZE for variable length support True ww_id 5000e1111c878001 World Wide Identifier False
Okay. So as the TS3100 is a LTO4 Tape Library, the next step obviously was to load a tape into the tape drive. Now this can be done through the Web Interface or the Control Panel of the library, but that’s not the way you want to go during day to day backup – media moving should be handled by the backup software (called BRMS on IBM i).
But alas, this is not as easy on VIOS. Basically, you can get an AIX root shell on VIOS by typing “oem_setup_env” – and then there are several AIX commands to manage a tape library.
There was only one problem:
# mtlib ksh: mtlib: not found. # tapeutil ksh: tapeutil: not found.
They’re not there. A quick google search revealed nothing. I didn’t know how IBM thought how we should use a tape library. In sequential mode? Or is there some way to manage a tape library in VIOS? If you know, tell me!
So, the next step was to create writable optical media, so i could start with creating a Save 21 of the system. This seemed as a sane first step.
First, i needed to create a virtual optical volume in a volume library on VIOS – i already had the volume library from the IBM i installation, so all i needed to do was to add a writable optical volume. The system used about 40GB DASD, so i created a virtual optical device with a size of 80GB to leave room for future growth. This process took around 2 hours, probably because VIOS pre-blanked the file (it effectively used up 80GB on disk). A rate of 0.6GB/min. During this operation, the VIOS webinterface grinded to halt (didn’t respond), but SSH was still available and responded very slowly to each command. I suppose this is some issue with the disk controller, either the driver or firmware.
According to vmstat, most of the time is spent in system or IO wait context:
kthr memory page faults cpu ----- ----------- ------------------------ ------------ ----------------------- r b avm fre re pi po fr sr cy in sy cs us sy id wa pc ec 1 1 203749 6107 0 0 0 2485 3279 0 150 29483 6542 6 9 77 7 0.18 17.5 1 1 203732 6167 0 0 0 2464 2869 0 153 30479 6333 7 9 74 10 0.18 17.6
The next step was to load the newly created virtual media into the virtual optical drive that was attached to the IBM i partition. This was rather easy to do, just click through the web interface.
Now, we need to initialize the optical volume in IBM i OS:
INZOPT NEWVOL(‘Save21′)
DEV(OPT01)
CHECK(*NO)
TYPE(*PRIMARY)
This finished rather quickly, and i then started the Save 21.
GO SAVE/21. The performance wasn’t much better, though. the vmstat looked the same as above, indicating the same problem.
Further debugging using iostat revealed that a volume group is not a RAID1 array – but nonetheless, the disk subsystem is behaving oddly:
hdisk0, hdisk1: VIOS installation – part of it is mirrored VIOS, other part is volume group that is spanned across these two disks
hdisk2-5: SCSI passthrough to the IBM itty: tin tout avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc 0.0 614.0 0.0 7.7 72.2 20.1 0.1 8.3 Disks: % tm_act Kbps tps Kb_read Kb_wrtn hdisk0 1.0 8.0 2.0 0 8 hdisk1 85.0 20036.0 179.0 10080 9956 hdisk2 4.0 926.0 50.0 922 4 hdisk3 14.0 4481.0 98.0 4477 4 hdisk4 13.0 3730.0 96.0 3726 4 hdisk5 3.0 652.0 36.0 648 4
This is pure sequential IO – why is it reading from the disk? A similar picture was seen throughout the whole backup – even when backing up image catalogs from the IFS. hdisk1 consistently showed strong write activity. No idea why.
My AIX skills are weak, and i didn’t know a way to see on which files the write IO happened – however it’s important to know that read and write always showed the same numbers. To me, this looks like a problem – either in my config, firmware levels, or even a problem on IBMs side.
Either way, the Save 21 completed in 45 minutes. At around 40GB, this brings us to 0.9GB/min.
The next step is to backup to our LTO4 tape.
Here’s how the backup itself looks:
# find /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1 -print | backup -ivqf /dev/rmt0 -b 512 Backing up to /dev/rmt0. Cluster 262144 bytes (512 blocks). Volume 1 on /dev/rmt0 Backup finished on Mon Jul 21 20:45:18 CEST 2008; there are 167772672 blocks on 1 volumes.And the sequential IO performance is much more reasonable:
tty: tin tout avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc 0.0 615.0 11.2 29.0 58.2 1.6 0.4 40.9 Disks: % tm_act Kbps tps Kb_read Kb_wrtn hdisk0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 hdisk1 99.0 81920.0 160.0 81920 0 hdisk2 17.0 2250.0 29.0 0 2250 hdisk3 12.0 2236.0 28.0 0 2236 hdisk4 12.0 2385.0 30.0 0 2385 hdisk5 16.0 2250.0 29.0 0 2250
That’s roughly 5GB per Minute. A very decent performance.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. Attached to the BladeCenter S, we have a TS3100 with a single drive, in the BladeCenter S we have three Intel Blades running Windows Server 2008 and one POWER Blade running IBM i.
We need to back up all this to the TS3100 – on the Windows Side, i’ll be using BackupExec 12, on the i Side VIOS. How do i make sure that the tape drive can be used from both sides, without to much interaction?
The SAS Connectivity Module can attach the same port to multiple Blades. So installed BackupExec on one of the Windows Blades, just to see how interoperability would work out.
I ran a backup & restore on another tape, from BackupExec. This worked fine. The next step was loading the tape from the i Save back, and then run a test restore from that. Unfortunately, i couldn’t use BackupExec to just move the tape in the drive, so i had to use the TS3100 Web Interface again.
I looked at the tape drive from VIOS, which also seemed okay. I also saw how much space was used on the VIOS tape after checking it up with BackupExec (this is stored on a small RFID Chip on the Tape itself). But the real test was yet to come:
I started the restore from tape.
# restore -xvqf /dev/rmt0 -b 512 /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1 New volume on /dev/rmt0: Cluster size is 262144 bytes (512 blocks). The volume number is 1. The backup date is: Mon Jul 21 20:24:04 CEST 2008 Files are backed up by name. The user is root. x 85899345920 /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1 The total size is 85899345920 bytes. The number of restored files is 1.iostat also told me that the performance on restore was bit worse than when backing up:
tty: tin tout avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc 0.0 611.0 14.7 85.0 0.0 0.2 1.0 101.9 Disks: % tm_act Kbps tps Kb_read Kb_wrtn hdisk0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 hdisk1 100.0 48216.0 68.0 0 48216 hdisk2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 hdisk3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 hdisk4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 hdisk5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0
So after having restored the image file to VIOS, i could IPL from it and run a complete system restore. Nice. I didn’t want to scratch my whole setup and wait until a full restore, so i tried something simpler.
In the end, it turned out to be around 2GB/min. This was a lot faster than the creation of the file, which seems really odd to me.
After restoring the file in the VMLibrary, it automatically appeared again in VIOS. I only had to mount it to my IBM i partition. This could easily be done through the VIOS web interface.
I ran a simple restore:
RSTLIB SAVLIB(AVNEDIAS) DEV(OPT01)With simple results:
12 Objekt(e) von AVNEDIAS nach AVNEDIAS zurückgespeichert.
I also tried IPLing from the virtual optical media, which brought me into the limited paging DST. Nice!
AS you can see, this is not your fathers AS/400. This is a POWER Blade running IBM i. You’ll need to learn a bit about VIOS and AIX in order to make any sense on how this whole stuff works. But it’s not rocket science – i only know a bit about Linux, and was able to figure out the tasks i needed to do.
But now, how should one run this in production?
The current configuration i have seems unsuitable to production to me.
The TS3100 can be partitioned, and we could install two half-height LTO4 tapes. Reserving 12 Slots for Windows in Random Mode, and 12 Slots for VIOS in Sequential Mode. This would work, but there’s one huge downside: Price
Instead of using VIOS and clumsy hacks to get a halfway decent functionality, you can use Windows to backup everything. Save 21 and Systems Saves would run through VIOS in order to create bootable media, and then retrieved on the Windows side using SFTP.
For daily backups, we can use savefiles directly on the i, which is probably easier to deal with for most IBM i admins. These can be retrieved from the Windows side using FTP/TLS. The downside: If you have i and Windows people that work well together, i don’t see much of an issue. But if not, you got a big mess in your hands.
Unfortunately, this does option not exist yet. This is something that IBM should work on intensively. It will allow i admins to use well established backup processes with full library integration using BRMS.
Backing up the IBM i on Blade isn’t exactly easier than backing up a standalone POWER machine. In fact, it’s more difficult and requires additional skills.
Before buying a JS12 blade running IBM i, make sure that you think your disaster recovery strategy through completely. Your business partner should be able to help you with this.
Planning is crucial – Backup & Restore on the blade is different, and you’ll need to deal with VIOS when creating a procedure for fully automated Save 21 backups.
Any questions? What do you think about the situation? Want me to test something for you? Just leave a comment!
I also created a “i on Blade” category. Look at it if you want to see all my posts about this subject.
The i Blade is up and running, and i’ve received quite a bit of feedback on the Installing the JS12 Blade post.
In the meantime i wasn’t just wasting my time on trivial things such as getting actual customer work done, but also playing a bit further with the JS12 Blade.
I’ve installed the software my company produces (DIAS-iS) on the JS12 blade, and ran a few very unscientific benchmarks. But first let’s talk about the disk situation in with IBM i on a JS12 blade in a BladeCenter S (i really like those convoluted product names).
As i found out the hard way during the initial bladecenter setup, the JS12 blade only supports SAS disks, and can cause issues if you have SATA disks zoned to it.
There are a few important considerations when thinking about the IBM i/JS12/BladeCenter S combination: First off, disks are directly attached to VIOS, and then virtualized by VIOS for the IBM i as SCSI disks. It’s important to note here that you do not have any (supported) options of RAIDing the disks before the IBM i sees them. So all disks are mapped through 1:1 to the IBM i OS, and then mirrored using IBM i mirrored protection. This is entirely different from the approach you would use in a BladeCenter H with a FC attached SAN.
Just to be clear: There is no cache on the JS12 and there is no way to use any disk protection except IBM i mirrored protection. You can’t use RAID5, RAID6 or hotspares. You can’t VIOS mirrored volume groups either, because it’s unsupported.
I’m thinking about removing one of the disks from the BladeCenter in order to test how recovery from a disk failure would look like, but i’m afraid of wasting a lot of work that i’ve already invested in this system – i’ll try this shortly before i have to give everything back.
I’m not sure what the virtualization by VIOS exactly entails, but i would assume it’s fairly similar to what Hyper-V/ESX do when you create “Passthrough disks”. This probably means that things like Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) will probably not work.
Another, rather obvious, drawback is that you cannot install any expansion cards (well, there is the odd one you can install into the blade). But it also means there is no Twinax, no SNA directly over Ethernet, no Modems, etc. Not a big issue for us, as we’re urging our customers to stay current on technology, but not everyone is an IBM i shop – there are still lots of AS/400 shops out there.
If you access the System i Navigators SST/Disk management function, it will not be able to help you with disk locations. I haven’t found out on how to call disk locations in IVM/VIOS, but then again i don’t really know much about IVM/VIOS.
I’ve installed our software without a hitch, and loaded our 30GB Test/Benchmarking database on it. I ran several benchmarks, and the JS12 with it’s four SAS 15kRPM 147GB Arms in a mirrored configuration and one core and 13GB RAM in the IBM i LPAR was a bit slower (less than 5%) than our System i515 with four U320 15kRPM 70GB Arms in a RAID5 configuration and 3.5 GB in the IBM i LPAR.
Unfortunately, i do not have a M15 to pit against the JS12, as these two would be using comparable technology. It would also be interesting to see an M15 with four 147GB SAS disks in a mirrored configuration to compare the systems 1:1, especially regarding disk performance.
What’s next? Well, Backup obviously. If you’ve read the i on Blade manual you’ll see that saving to tape will be interesting to say the least. I already have a TS3100 ready to go, but i’m currently missing a SAS for attaching it. As soon as i have the cable, expect a big post about saving and restoring.
Questions? Suggestions? Any specific questions about i on Blade? Want me to test something for you?
Leave a comment or drop me a mail. I’ll be happy to help.
I noticed something interesting when installing the IBM license key on the JS12 blade running IBM i V6R1. I received Message CPF9E2D when trying to install one of the 5761-SS1 license key. Turns out this one controls the number of cores licensed in the machine.
Luckily, this was easy to remedy. Just access IVM and remove one of the cores assigned to the LPAR running IBM i.
IBM licenses it Software based on numbers of Core, not number of Sockets like most other vendors do. This is important to note, because i though the message was wrong as the blade only has a single CPU.
If you came to this post for detailed instructions on how to setup IBM i on a blade, read this offical IBM i on Blade document. I’ve wrote about my personal experiences, not detailed instructions.
Just two hours ago, i’ve received a shipment of four 3.5″ 147GB 15kRPM SAS Disks. I installed them into the BladeCenter S immediately.
I used SCM to assign the disks in the DSM to the JS12, and then booted the blade.
VIOS was already installed. So all i had to do was to create a new partition.
After creating the partition, i didn’t IPL it just yet. I needed System i Access in order to provide a console. The Operations Console part of System i Access is not supported on Server versions of Windows, so i couldn’t install it on one of the other blades running Windows Server 2008. At least not directly. So i installed the Hyper-V Role on one of the blades, and installed Windows XP and System i Access on it.
I then IPLed the partition and a minute later i was standing there with a lit attention light. I forgot about the CD drive. Bummer. I assigned the media tray to the JS12 blade, but it couldn’t see the CD drive. This must’ve worked before, because i installed VIOS using a CD. I restarted the JS12, but that wasn’t helping. Still no CD drive that i could assign to a partition. Didn’t find much on the web about this problem either, so i decided to use virtual media to install the operating system.
I logged into VIOS using SSH, downloaded the I_BASE_01 CD Image from our production system using FTP, and imported it into VIOS’s media library. I activated the I_BASE_01 CD Image, and booted. I also enabled the operations console connection (which is fairly straightforward, with just in this case the first IBM i instance having the partition ID 2).
After 10 minutes, the signon screen for the operations console finally appeared. That was kind of a Heureka! moment for me, altough i didn’t really do that much stuff yet.
I chose to install the LIC, and i was presented with a screen that i haven’t seen before – i was able to select the which disk i want to be the load source.
After that, the system started to initialize the hard drive. This was really slow on my system, taking around 5 hours for a single 147GB 15kRPM drive. I hope this isn’t indicative of the IO speed we will see when the IBM i OS is running.
While waiting for the formatting to complete, i tried to find a way on how to turn off the attention light that was lit because of my earlier mistake when trying to boot the partition. There is a detailed IBM document about turning off the attention light using IVM/VIOS. It’s a simple command: chled -r sa -t virtualsys -o off
As you can see from the screenshot (took during the middle of the run), it took quite long. In fact, it even exceeded the three hours it estimated and took 4.5 hours. I have an issue with that – the Intel blades do not need that much for initiating a RAID1 set, or NTFS formatting the disks. Even though they’re using slower 500GB SATA disks. It’s just leaving a bad impression for no reason. And it’s also an issue with disaster recovery.
Installing the LIC had a more reasonable speed, took 2 minutes. After the system IPLd again, i was able to add the three other disks. Adding the disks proceeded at a much more reasonable speed, but then it hung at 99%. After two hours, the system was still stuck at 99%. At that time, I went to bed, hoping the system would be finished in the morning.
And it really was finished in the morning. The next step was to start mirrored protection. It even complained that i was running virtual disks, and a failure of VIOS would lead to the system crashing anyway. I proceeded. As always. the first part was pretty quick, and i proceeded with the OS installation.
As the LIC started, initialization of mirroring began. The first time estimate was fifteen minutes. The next one was 6 hours, 10 minutes, then 8 hours. But then i jumped back to 5 hours. I left for a customer, and looked at the status occasionally. I took somewhere between 3 and 4 hours to complete.
Next, i had to change the virtual media in order to allow the OS installation to proceed further. It’s important to know that this has to be done in the partition configuration, not in the virtual media tab. And that you’ll need to acknowledge the partition change in order to make the media change active (the AJAXy web interface doesn’t make this entirely clear).
After that, the IBM i installation started and proceeded at an acceptable speed. In around an hour, the basic operating system was installed.
After that, installation of the licensed programs started. It halted after just half an hour and telling me i had a screen error (MSG CPF3D92). I suspected a problem with the operations console, restarted the XP machine running OpsCon, and retried the installation (with just the base system). The problem happened again. This seemed odd.
Having no idea on how to proceed further, i retried again. This time it worked(?). I figured it was an OpsConsole problem, probably related to the fact that the machine running OpsCon was virtualized. I quickly installed the TCP/IP utilities, IPLd the system and installed the remaining programs using a 5250/Telnet connection.
While the installation happened, i used an additional session to explore the system. The disks where shown to the system as virtual disks, similar to SAN attached disks. But one of the more interesting parts was looking at the Hardware Service Manager in SST/DST – it was completely empty, and didn’t contain any hardware. For me, this was a moment that was quite indicative of the whole experience – i on Blade is not “AS/400 in Blade Form”. It’s a completely new environment that you’ll need to learn to deal with. You got another layer of indirection (VIOS) with it’s own platform (AIX), plus you have the blade management in itself.
The whole setup took me roughly 24 hours (i started a day ago at 16:00). Of course, the system wasn’t always busy because i didn’t give him any work, but it’s worth to note that setting up a JS12 blade takes considerably longer than setting up a model 515 or M15.
I will now continue setting up our ERP application and make further tests with the hardware. If you have any requests for screenshots or want me to test something out, tell me!
Last Friday i received a new toy. An IBM BladeCenter S, with two HS21, one HS21 XM and a JS12 Blade.
The BladeCenter S i received came with 10 500GB SATA Disks and two DSMs, four power supplies, an Advanced Management Module, a Server Connectivity Module and a SAS Connectivity Module. The power supplies use standard 230V type 23 plugs, which do require a little special installation, but much less so than industrial plugs used with the bigger BladeCenters.
The big point about the BladeCenter S is that it does not require an external SAN to provide Storage to the Blade – an integrated SAS Switch that allows very flexible disk configurations is integrated. Configuration can be done using a Webbrowser against the SAS Connectivity Web Interface, using SSH/Telnet to access the SAS Connectivity Commandline, or using a fully graphical interface using IBM’s Storage Configuration Manager. There are some predefined configurations, but none of them suited my configuration – creating new configurations using SCM is easy enough though.
The disks in the BladeCenter’s DSMs (Disk Storage Module) are hot swappable – currently, only 3.5″ DSMs are available, with a 2.5″ DSM in the pipeline. Most of the blades support one or two internal disks, but the problem here is that these disks are not hot swappable. Depending on your Blade loadout, 12 disks might not be enough. For example, the HS21 XM Blades only fit one internal disk, and running without RAID on the System partition seems pointless, so you would be using at least 6 disks (without hotspares) for a basic Exchange deployment.
The Webinterface on the AMM is nicely done, although it lacks a bit of flashiness. That’s not a requirement though, it does a very solid job at what it needs to do.
After powering up the BladeCenter S for the first time, i connected to it using a web browser and upgraded all the firmwares. There are quite a lot of them (AMM, SAS, Server Connectivity), but it all worked out flawlessly. Time to move on to the real course: the Blades.
Starting with the familiar first, i started with the HS21 Intel Blades first. The two HS21 Blades both had a 2.66 Ghz Quadcore and 4GB RAM, the HS21 XM Blade had a 2.5 Ghz Quadcore and 9GB of RAM (more about that later).
When starting the first HS21 Blade, after configuring all the storage using SCM, it failed to POST it’s LSI Logic SAS/RAID Controller. I searched for the error message on the net, assuming that i screwed up the configuration. I didn’t find anything meaningful, so i tried to do what everyone else would do in this situation: Apply every Firmware update for the Blade i could find.
Of course it wasn’t as easy as i wanted it to be. The controller not POSTing was an endless loop, i couldn’t get the machine to start from the AMM virtual floppy drive. I used SCM to disconnect the storage (by disabling the Blade’s SAS port). Now, the blade booted flawlessly, indicating that i probably had a problem with my disks. When browsing the IBM website, it became obvious that only newer firmwares support SATA drives. After upgrading the SAS Firmware, i was able to boot the blade without disabling the Blade’s SAS port. Unfortunately, the onboard SAS controller only supports RAID level 1 and 10. Probably owed to the fact that most blades are using SAN storage – IBM promised that there would be SAS RAID adapter that supports other RAID levels – these are especially important for the cost-conscious SMB market.
I booted a Windows PE 2.0 using WDS, and was able to install Windows Server 2008 x64 without any issues.
The HS21 XM blade on the other hand complained when booted for the first time that it’s memory configuration was invalid – it only supports 2, 4 and 8 DIMM configurations – 6 DIMM configurations are not supported. I removed two 512MB modules and booted the Blade with 8GB – it worked flawlessly and without complaining.
First, read this document about i on Blade. It explains everything better than i ever could.
The JS12 is a POWER6 based blade that is able to run IBM i. The first time i turned on the blade, all the HS21 blades (already running Windows Server 2008) crashed hard. When rebooting, they no longer found their drives. I turned off all the blades, disconnected the JS12′s SAS port and turned everything on again. The Intel blades booted, and after i was sure that they’re up and running again, i powered on the JS12 again. This time, no issue arised. I tried to reproduce the behaviour i’ve seen before, and the same thing happened again.
My current assumption is that the issues were caused by the SAS Controller which does not have a Firmware update yet, and can’t deal with the SATA drives located in the DSMs. Further investigation told me that there’s no firmware upgrade for the SAS Controller in the POWER6 blade, and that SATA drives are not supported when running IBM i on the blade anyway. I ordered 4 147GB SAS drives, disabled the SAS port on the blade, and tried booting the POWER6 blade again. It booted flawlessly again.
The next step was to install VIOS – this is a rather complicated multi-step process. First, you have to turn on “Serial over LAN” aka SOL, then logon to the AMM using SSH, connect to the POWER blade using serial passthrough and then boot the blade from the VIOS CD. The install is pretty self explanatory, but takes forever. Expect 3 to 4 hours.
Next is connecting to the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) running on the VIOS partition. The IVM is basically a HMC light minus the console functionality. The only way to get a console on the JS12 blade is using a LAN console (which can only run on consumer versions of Windows, and is not supported on most of the Blades).
I installed the latest VIOS patches (around 4GB) and enabled mirroring on the two 147GB SAS disks in the blade itself. The next step will be installing IBM i, with which i have to wait until i receive the ordered SAS Disks. Installing the patches also takes quite some time, around 30 minutes.
The BladeCenter S is great. Yep, not everything ran flawlessly from the start, but nobody’s perfect from the beginning. The BladeCenter brings an innovative new perspective to the SMB market. The problems that IBM needs to address are the addition of 2.5″ DSMs (already in the works) and more capable RAID controllers (also in the works). A BladeCenter S with the ability to use around 20-40 disks could prove interesting.
The POWER6 Blade is interesting, and while VIOS adds complexity, it is as streamlined as possible. I’m interested about seeing IBM i running on the machine.
If you have any other question about the BladeCenter S – or anything you would like to see in detail, post a comment. I’ll try to figure it out.
Today i’ve tried to setup a new LPAR on our 9407-515. A small test LPAR, with a minimum amount of resources a allocated. Just a disk controller for the OS, and one for the optical drive to do installations. It all went smooth, booted from the optical drive, and then i’ve tried to install the LIC.
It failed with the following error message:
Install Licensed Internal Code - Error
Error:
A device could not be selected to be the load source.
Return to Dedicated Service Tools and run diagnostics
to determine why a device could not be selected.
Correct the problem and install the Licensed Internal Code
again.
I checked the LPAR Configuration, checked the System Plan, recreated config in the System Planning tool, but all of them said it should work. I checked the disks inside the very limited pre-paging DST, but didn’t find anything wrong.
I posted to the Midrange-L, describing my problem. Not having much experience with LPARs, i expected myself to have set some silly flag wrong.
After a bit discussion with a few helpful repliers, it seemed that there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with my configuration. I checked the schematics again, and digged deeper into the limited DST, but still didn’t find anything. I called IBM hardware support, and he guided me through the limited DST again – then i suddenly saw it: “IO Bus: 1″. The disks were attached to the second channel of the SCSI RAID controller, rendering them unbootable but otherwise completely healthy.
I deactivated the partition, moved the machine out on the drawer and checked the cabling. Yep, it was definitively in the wrong SCSI Port of the adapter. I replugged it, moved the machine back and actived the partition. After a bit of waiting i was able to install the LIC.
I’ve spent most my week with working with reporting bugs for IBM’s new DB2 Web Query for System i.
I’ve written mostly about my negative experiences, because there wasn’t much else to be done for me. With the most basic tasks like the German language version and Query/400 import failing, we couldn’t experience all the cool things that QU supposedly offers.
While reading the appropriate Redbook and doing the exercises located within, it looks like a necessity to create some more complicated views to avoid of having to do too many custom joins in the report itself. But this entirely depends on your database structure. QU2 can extract information from your foreign keys in order to generate joins automatically, but this of course only works if you’re already using foreign keys (you should!).
As things are right now, all PMR’s i’ve talked about so far are still open and unfixed, mostly because they’re not in IBM’s direct responsibly and have to be forwarded to Information Builders. And they’re all for very basic functionality like changing the language of the product, or of it’s key features – it works properly in an U.S. English environment, but not yet in a #2939 Swiss German environment.
I will hold a small in-house demo to get word about this new product out and i hope that my coworkers have a bit of a more positive mind about the product than i do. We will see. I’ll post progress of my still-open PMRs, IBM is working on a fix, so i’ll hope it is resolved quickly.
Straight from PMR 61860,212,848 – the Query/400 import issue (details here).
For a circumvention you can try either of these:
1) Try to create the metadata with a usrprf with CCSID 37
2) Use this other console (we call it the “metadata console”) at port 11333. Click on “Add Metadata”, Data Adapters, the screen after that will look similar to port 11331
Oh, and there is more fun to be had. The overview list when importing queries does not show the correct text, it forgets about all the umlauts – see the screenshots to the right (PMR 61876,212,848).
Two workarounds, neither of them do actually work. No ETA for a fix yet, because it has to be forwarded to Information builders.
