Re: i hosting i question -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Paul

you didn't ask me, but if I had a choice I would always do SAN if only to
get Flash copy capability.
Once you have used a flash copy for a backup or to make a copy you would
never willingly give up that option.

I've done a lot of hosting of i on i (maybe not be Larry's standards) but
even though I need a LOT of help with VIOS it woudl probably be my first
choice unless the hosting environment was very simple and very stable.

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 9:53 AM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Larry,

2 LPARs,
Production-6tb.
R&D-12tb.

1) Would do VIOS for only 2 LPARs?
2) What disk choice? Internal or SAN

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
DrFranken
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 3:33 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion; Jim Oberholtzer
Subject: Re: i hosting i question

VIOS to SAN disk absolutely. Only way to fly.

VIOS on Internal disk though hosting IBM i or frankly anything is still on
my naughty list. THE number one issue is the lack of knowledge on that both
from the IBM Hardware group as well as the support center.

We have had multiple times where the customer lost EVERYTHING because
support directed local CEs to do things they should not have done. In
addition most IBM i only shops cannot spell VIOS or AIX and as a
consequence they NEVER update the VIOS partitions or the firmware of the
devices said partitions own. Thus landmines are buried.

Honestly though if you have many TB of disk why NOT SAN?

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 11/22/2017 10:16 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

I might also offer that if you are architecting a new solution and
more than two hosted partitions are planned, you should really look
into using VIOS to perform the virtualization. VIOS offers several
advantages to IBM i hosting IBM i, chief among them are you're not
burning IBM i licensing to perform the hosting. Virtualizing fibre

attached tape is a breeze as well.

If you use the vSCSI drives with local storage there are a couple of
tuning things you need to do in VIOS for I/O blocking etc, but that is
all well documented.

Geesh, I never thought I would ever post something nice about VIOS
but, then again, it's true. We use it quite a bit.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Steinmetz, Paul
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 8:55 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: i hosting i question

+1
I/O hosting much improved with SSD drives.
I have a Production SSD LPAR hosting only some I/O to R&D LPAR for
some improved R&D performance, no issues.
The R&D LPAR has its own dedicated CPU and memory.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Jim Oberholtzer
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:35 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: i hosting i question

There is some truth to that statement, but of course, "it depends".

Usually it's because the host system I/O becomes the bottleneck with
large partitions. We have several 7TB and 8TB partitions at customers
that are hosted, but we have carefully monitored the I/O on the host

system and

ensured that it has plenty of memory and CPU. Watch disk unit busy
percentage on the host system. If that gets too high (>20%) then all
the virtualized systems suffer.

Remember CPU is needed to manage the virtualization and most folks get
too skinny on that part. Don't worry that the percent of CPU is near
zero most of the time, the virtualization CPU usage does not really
show on the WRKSYSSTS display. We use WRYSYSACT to find the
virtualization jobs and monitor them.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Tom Duncan
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 4:06 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: i hosting i question

I just had someone tell me that IBM does not recommend using i hosting
i if the amount of disk is over 3 or 4 Tbytes for performance reasons.
Is anyone aware of or even heard of this ?
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