Every IBM Power Systems administrator eventually encounters the “Black Box” scenario: an LPAR is triggered to reboot, no Reference Code appears on the HMC, and the terminal remains frozen—often stuck on a…
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Stop Wasting CPU Cycles: Hardware-Accelerated Compression on IBM Power
Data compression is standard requirement in modern IT infrastructure. We do it daily to save storage space and reduce network bandwidth. However, traditional software compression comes with a hidden tax—it is a…
AIX and Memory – How much RAM do I have available?
Introduction Monitoring RAM usage is a key aspect of operating system administration, and the ability to properly interpret the results of system tools seems to be something every systems specialist should possess.…
Intel x86, IBM Power, and Containers: A unified IT infrastructure
For some, what I’m about to describe might seem obvious. However, in my experience, many people still don’t fully understand how different technologies interact with each other and what their specific applications…
Using Ansible for HMC Update
When managing the HMC console, the activity that needs to be done from time to time is to update it. In the life cycle of the console, ifixes and servie packs are…
IBM Power Ansible in Practice: Adding a VLAN to SEA (Shared Ethernet Adapter)
Here’s a practical approach to managing network configuration on IBM Power servers using Ansible and the ibm.power_hmc collection. Using a playbook as an example, I’ll show how to add a new VLAN…
AIX – health check of NVME drives
Since the release of the Power9 servers, the new servers come with NVMe drives. Internal NVMe drives can be used to install VIOS. This raises the question of what condition the NVMe…
IBM Creates Great Technologies, But What Happened to Them?
Today, I found out that IBM engineers created and contributed to adding support for LXC containers to the Linux kernel – a technology that became the foundation of modern containerization. Sounds impressive,…
Error Analysis in AIX: Interpreting ERRPT Sense Data
In the AIX system, when an error occurs, information about it is logged in the error log. By reviewing the errors that have appeared in the system (errpt), we can read basic…
Intruduction to AIX
In the world of technology, Unix systems are often perceived as complex, intended exclusively for a narrow group of specialists with advanced knowledge. IBM AIX, one of the most mature and stable…