Re: Hosting Linux partitions on IBM i

Hello Michael,

Am 01.10.2020 um 00:04 schrieb Michael Quigley - Sec <MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx>:

Gott segnen sie!

You're most welcome. (The second n is wrong, btw.) :-)

My apologies for being rather slow at replying. I've started to reply several times and another interruption happens. I really appreciate your response. I'll reply in-line below

No worries.

Excellent link! I've started reading through it. I know IBM added functionality since this was published, but it seems to still be relevant.

Yes, that's what I felt also: In general, it's still relevant.

We do not have an HMC. :-(

Maybe others can offer some advice here: How to do "dynamic partitioning" (aka move RAM and/or CPU resources between LPARs) without HMC. Maybe the PDF I linked has some advice on this? I did not look closely in the non-HMC parts.

I'll start with a minimal set up and increase as needed.

Good idea. Also, for CPU resources, watch vmstat 2, the "r" (run queue) column. This is how many processes are waiting for the CPU at a given point in time. If this value goes over two for prolonged time, adding more cores will give a performance benefit. Also, if there are spikes when the value rushes up to two-digit values, adding more cores will help to flatten these spikes. I recommend to set the minimum CPU to 0.1 and use the "uncapped" flag for the CPU resources for that LPAR, so it's allowed to use whatever is available at the moment, and will release resources back to the minimum (0.1 CPUs) when the work is done.

As I said, we're not planning on anything very heavy. But we figure we've got the big POWER9 box and we would like to take advantage of some of the horsepower.

I also heard others in here contemplating about the machines being so wicked fast that they're faster than work comes in. :-)

I haven't been able to repair my crystal ball either.

Duh! :-D

We will host one couple of webpages developed in C#.

Hmm. What is actually running these pages. Aka, what runs the C# code and transforms it to HTML for the browser?

We've been running it on a sandbox Windows server, but we need to set up development and production environments. We would like these two environments to look the same and I don't think we have that many Windows Server licenses to play with. (That and I would like to utilize more of the capability of the POWER9 box.)

Fair enough. Advice: You can easily set up one Linux install until it's doing what you want and later just duplicate the NWSSTG files in the IFS, to get an exact clone of this machine's install (including a duplicate IP conflict, if you don't take countermeasures).
I've not installed Linux for years now but have a VM as template, running to keep it up to date but shutting it down and cloning it when I need a new machine.

:wq! PoC

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