Re: i hosting i question -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Paul

there's potentially a bit more to it than "only 90 minutes for backups"
(paraphrasing).
What you get with flashcopy is a backup that's done in literally minutes
that allows you to continue with whatever else you were doing.
But the other part of that is that you also get the ability to *restore*
your entire system in literally minutes and restart from the point in time
the flash copy was taken.
It's especially valuable when taking point in time "whole system" saves
before an upgrade or similar tasks.

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 10:09 AM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Larry,

If 100% SSD, no need for easy tier.
Currently no issues with backup, 90 mins, SSD to LTO7.
Growth is small, no need to add.

Can I go SAN without VIOS?

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: DrFranken [mailto:midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 4:01 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion; Steinmetz, Paul; 'Jim
Oberholtzer'
Subject: Re: i hosting i question

Sure VIO can do that but SAN better choice.
You get things like easy tier to move hot data to SSD and cold data away.

You get flash copy for doing backups at a point in time that's not stuck
while you are doing the backups.

You can add drawers on the fly unlike internal disk. There are also more
disk options with SAN as well.

I do NOT hate internal disk, reliable and predictable for decades but SAN
disk brings options that internal doesn't.

18TB, I'd be on SAN for sure.

- 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 3:53 PM, Steinmetz, Paul 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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