[HarryStoner]

Hi All,

Just discovered the forum this morning. I'm working with our teams in rolling AIX APV into the Customer environment (I'm Mid-Range Account Architect for an IBM SO Customer).

So far, so good. We're developing VIO rulesets (when to use, when not to), what policies to adopt for resource limits, etc. There has been a fair amount of work done on this already out in the community, but the area I'm still trying to nail down is how to instrument and monitor the VIO Server itself. It appears that the vendor community has yet to provide agents for VIO deployment.

We're using BMC Patrol, Perform & Predict, Tivoli TEC/TMR, etc. for static LPARs and I believe this will all work well in our new virtual LPAR setting. However, we do still have a blank spot on the map around VIO integration with existing ESM & monitoring infrastructures.

Any suggestions ? I'm betting someone out there has already met this need, in one manner or another. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks

[steevojb]

Hi There,

I work for a small service provider in the UK. Over the last 6 years we have developed software for monitoring our customers and own datacentre environments. The software is SNMP based and uses the well known MRTG to generate performance graphs. We essentially install our RedAlert agent onto the VIO server and a version of net-snmp from sourceforge as a driver to get and manage the information. At the moment I am monitoring CPU, Memory, Paging, Disk I/O from SNMP OID's. I am currently looking at CPU stats from an LPAR perspective (%entc, free pool etc). Unfortunately I asked IBM the question as per whether they would be providing an SNMP MIB to get values from LPAR related statistics. The response was negative. I therefore use standard tools such as vmstat, iostat, lparstat and more recently viostat to send information to text files. I then query the data in the output files to generate my performance graphs.

We rely on the graphs to provide us with a trend of what's going on over periods of time. They are simple and provide a good overview of whats going on within the VIO server.

Red Squared Plc

Steve