Ron Gordon
Director » Power Systems
Recently, IBM Power Systems (IBM Systems group) made several announcements of upcoming systems software updates with new functionality. These announcements are a combination of software support directly from developers (i.e. PowerVM) and open source code developers (i.e. PowerVC) in selected offerings. The new software capabilities reinforce the strategic statements made by the IBM Power Systems group in the IBM AIX Strategy White Paper. (Read my blog “Is AIX Dead? IBM Publishes AIX Strategy and Roadmap Document”.)
PowerVM and PowerVC
All the announcements are worth a deeper dive than I can discuss in this blog, but I am particularly enlightened by IBM’s continued focus on AIX, IBMi, PowerVM and PowerVC. While users of AIX and IBM i understand their value of continued evolution, I find the changes to PowerVM, with persistent memory support, and the continued evolution of PowerVC, with license key injection and inactive partition migration, of great value to customers using Power Systems for mission critical workloads. I have a strong opinion that everyone should be using PowerVM and PowerVC because they provide both cost and time saving value, as well as easing the administration workload through automation…but alas, not everyone is using them yet. Maybe soon.
IBM Power Systems Announcement Overview
Here is a brief overview of the announcement content; notice the General Availability (GA) dates vary between November and December 2019:
- IBMi 7.4 TR 1 to GA November 15, 2019
Added function:
DB2 Mirror for i SOD for support of internal disks
HA System Mirror for IBMi improvement in performance
Improvements to Digital Certificate Manger
Integrated Web Server
BRMS improvements
New Generation of 2.5 inch SSDs with longer write-wear
PCIe NVMe available (up to 6.2 TBs)
Improvements to Rational Developer
- AIX 7.2 TL 4 to GA November 15, 2019
Added function:
Security improvements in IPsec resiliency
Live update performance improvements
New IO device support
Live update now supported by Oracle
Enhanced MPIO and AIX PCM
AIX Fibre Channel timeouts user configurable
- PowerVM 3.1.1 to GA November 15, 2019
Added function:
Persistent Memory for application restart
Enhanced SRIOV and vNIC performance
Improved LPM performance
New VIOS upgrade tool
- vHMC 9.1.940 (for Power Systems or x86) to GA November 15, 2019
Added function:
Support for PowerVM 3.1.1 Persistent Memory
Support for FW 940
IBM PowerSC MFA support
Injection of IBMi license keys
- PowerVC 1.4.4 to GA December 12, 2019
Added function:
IBMi license key injection
Pin VMs to specific hosts
Inactive Partition migration
- HA System Mirror for AIX 7.2.4 to GA December 13, 2019
Added function:
Cross cluster verification
Selectable DB2 multiple databases
IBM WebSphere MQ listener support for s/s monitoring
Availability metrics
- HA System Mirror for Linux 7.2.3 to GA December 13, 2019
Added function:
Smart Assist for SAP HANA
Multi-node distributed heartbeat
Support for SLES 15 and RedHat 8
- Virtual Machine Recover Manager 1.4 (HA and DR to GA December 13, 2019
Added function:
Improved restart of SAP HANA
Proactive predictions of CPU, Memory, and file systems
Create workgroups or VM groups
DR product also includes HA product
- PowerSC Standard Edition 1.3 to GA December 13, 2019
Added function:
New compliance profiles for
SAP HANA
US Dept of Defense
Center for Internet Security
IBMi Integration
Reporting improvements
Multifactor Authentication enablement
- IBM Cloud Management Console to GA December 13, 2019
Added function:
Support of Enterprise Pools 2.0
- New generation of SSDs with 387GB to 1550GB to GA November 15, 2019
Added function:
Increased reliability, endurance, capacity
For IBMi, PCIe x8 NVMe 1.3TB to 6.4TB
As many IBM Power installations are using a subset of this full product list, the relationships of the new functionality and an in-depth analysis of the applicability to your implementation should be studied. Mainline is available to assist you with this analysis in addition to the migration and upgrade paths to the new product levels.
Please contact your Mainline representative for continuation of discussions on these product upgrades.
Click here to contact us with any questions..
Related Information:
Blog: Is AIX Dead? IBM Publishes AIX Strategy and Roadmap Document
Blog: Power Systems in the IBM Cloud: Enterprise Level Cloud Support