More To Love About V7.2
The Following Feature Came From Posts by Steve Bradshaw of Rowton IT Specialist
Steve Bradshaw is the founder and managing director of Wolverhampton, UK-based Power Systems specialist Rowton IT Solutions and technical director of British IBM i user group i-UG. He has been a key contributor to PowerWire since 2012 and he also sits on the Common Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) which helps IBM shape the future of IBM i.
Performance Monitoring
Performance Tools are nothing new to IBM i. For as long as I can recall we have had tooling from IBM and third-parties that will tell us about how our system is performing, but what is so different about the latest implementation is just how easy it is to use.
Based on the inbuilt Director Navigator for i browser interface, there is no special software for you to load. Just point your browser of choice (I suggest you use Firefox for the best experience) to http://YourServerIP:2001, login with your normal IBM i user name, select Performance and off you go. By default, your system will have been collecting performance data for you so you can hit the ground running.
If you are new to this tool, I would suggest you start with the Health Indicators. These simple traffic-light interfaces quickly show you any issues you might have on your system. They then allow you to drill down into the detail to find the issue.
Better still, most of these new Performance Tools features, created for V7.2, have been PTF’d back to V7.1. And, if that was not enough, you can analyze data from one system to another, even taking data from a V6.1 system and analyzing it on a V7.1 or V7.2 system.
In the screenshot below, the Health Indicator shows that the system is suffering from a disk issue.
Performance System Health Indicators
You can then use the Select Action function to drill down to see exactly what type of issue and which job is causing it.
Batch Model
For as long as there have been servers, people have been asking how much faster their system would be if they were to add RAM, disks or switch to the latest model. Finding these answers is often seen as a bit of a dark art, often based on personal opinion or the guidelines of a single business partner or ISV.
What IBM has done is phenomenally clever and useful. It takes the detailed performance information it collects and allows you to model it through a series of “what if” questions and immediately see the difference they would make at both a system and a job level.
You can change the Batch Model to show the difference the following changes would make:
• adding another processor
• adding more HDD disk arms
• adding SSDs
• upgrading to a different model or generation of server
• increasing your current workload by a given percentage
• moving a workload from one timeslot to another.
You can compare graphs or tables of raw data of both the before and after to see whether it really would be worth spending your time and cash on that upgrade.
In the example below, we look at the improvement that adding another 13 disks would make to an existing client’s workload. The first graph shows a summary of the current situation, called the Measured Resource. The green line is the average disk percentage busy and the purple line the CPU.
Measured_Resource_Utilization
In this next graph, we see the effect of the disk upgrade on that same workload. This is called the Modeled Resource. In this case we see the disk utilization halves, allowing many of the long-running I/O-bound jobs to finish in half the time.
Modeled_Resource_Utilization
Need help with your upgrade to IBM i V7.2? Email me at blosey@source-data.com or call me at 714-593-0387.
