IBM are gradually releasing the features from the next generation of POWER7 VIOS. In short VIO servers will be able to participate in a cluster outside of a single frame (across multiple boxes). This will mean that you can present virtual disks to LPAR's from one VIO server and make them available to another server via another VIO server at the same time without using NPIV. This reduces the dependency on feature rich storage (and cooperative storage teams!) will prove useful for the scale-out clustering technologies and for partition mobility.

They are planning to build in some useful auto-provisioning, Snapshot, cloning and thin provisioning features at the VIO cluster level all controller by director. Making it much more flexible to work in a virtualised environment with multiple systems.

As of AIX 6.1 TL4  an ISO image file can be directly mounted as a File System.

I've been asked this question quite a lot lately, and to be honest I've been a bit stumped, other than a  gut feeling that monitoring from the OS as well as the VMware layer is a good idea, I had little else to offer the argument. So I figured I should take a more serious look at the monitoring available within VMware vCenter and come up with a more compelling argument. Perhaps the more seasoned VMware admins out their could comment to offer their thoughts on the topic?

vCenter for VMware provides an excellent selection of performance graphs enabling you to track the CPU, memory, network and I/O consumption for each VM as well as the ESX host itself. You can also set "alarms" that trigger e-mail notifications. So why would I ever need an additional agent based OS monitoring package? What more could you possibly need? Do the OS metrics become less important in a VM world?

It seems that IBM hasn't slowed down the development of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) since migrating the internal database to a DB2 database, as TSM v6.2 has just been announced this week. Availability will be electronic from March 19th, with physical media a month later. (Not that many people rely on physical media for software distribution these days.)

There's some interesting new features as well with this release. The most notable feature is block-level deduplication at the client level, so if you've got a client with a lot of similar files then this feature can provide significant benefit. both in terms of storage and network utilisation. Note that this dedupes at the client level, not the server, so if two clients have the same files this feature will not dedupe between those clients. {Edit: I'm told it's actually cross-client, however I'll wait until the official documentation is available before making further comment.) If you want cross-client dedupe then this can be achieved via other means, such as file based disk storage pools or deduped based storage at the back-end.

We all know the pitch, consolidate your storage, virtualise your servers and share the infrastructure where possible  through use of a blade based solution for the best possible TCO.  Why would anyone do anything else? We are all agreed. OK lets look at some prices to back up our cost busting claims. I have used list prices throughout. Discounts will vary according to customer, vendor and the time of year.

Example 1

Customer has been buying HP-UX servers and storage for one application and IBM AIX servers and storage for another application that often sit together in the same rack. Would it make sense for both systems to use the same storage? Of course it will. OK what's is the price? The HP storage being used is an MSA60 SAS attached with 9 disks....

Asynchronous I/O is handled differently under AIX 6.1.
Prior to AIX 6.1, AIO is a device whose details are stored in the ODM and managed using the ‘chdev’ command.
From AIX 6.1 and above, AIO is no longer a device, and is managed using the ‘ioo’ command.
AIO is a prerequisite of Oracle, and must be ‘enabled’ prior to installing Oracle.
Prior to AIX 6.1, AIO is enabled as follows:

According to the below report AIX on POWER is still statistically the best OS for maximum uptime. I think that the comparison of the UNIX based operating systems are fair as these servers are likely to be doing similar jobs. The Windows results however are heavily skewed by the number of security patches that have had to be applied to the frontline servers. Is this a measure of the OS or a reflection on the position of the servers in the application stack/network layer?

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98475/windows-server-the-new-king-of-downtime.html

I would be really interested in a report that compared similar applications (e.g. ERP or database systems) running on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and windows. 
Relative performance comparisons and benchmarking different systems is something that can be done in a finite amount of time with a lab full of kit. But uptime comparisons rely on surveys and user reports over an extended period of time, and never seem to be from well grouped application categories. If anyone has seen better stats that make more detailed comparison of OS uptime please let me know.

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Here's a great 2 page cheat sheet for AIX, paste it on your office wall and you'll always have the command you need staring you in the face.

http://centiq.co.uk/attachments/150_aix-quicksheet.pdf

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Whenever you clone an operating system you always end up with a few items that you didn't necessarily want.  Things like persistent hardware address can be a pain and cloning encryption keys is never a good idea.  When cloning SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) you may have issues when you come to register your systems online with Novell.  The problem is all cloned systems have an identical Zenworks device ID, so only the first system works.

 Follow these steps to create a new Zenworks device ID.

I've been typing find / -size +10000 -exec ls -l {} ; for the last 15 years.  (find any file that's over 5000Kb (10000*512 bytes) in size) 

The other day my colleague pointed out I could just type  find / -size +10000 -ls