BVQ for IBM PowerVM Platform
- Thomas Sikora
- Sabine Engel
BVQ for IBM PowerVM use cases
BVQ for IBM PowerVM finds answers to your typical use cases around that platform:
- Overview and dependencies: BVQ knows about the current dependencies between HW components like CPUs, adapters, memory, VIOSs, FC switches, storage systems and LPARs and makes all these visible to the user.
- Redundancies: Are my LPARs connected redundantly to the outer environment? Is it save to shutdown a particular VIOS or will my LPARs survive an outage of a VIOS or storage path?
- Health state: Is my configuration according to best practices? Are Profile Auto-Sync, SRR, LPAR Auto-Start, RMC services set corectly?
- SAN zoning: Are my vFC Adapter ports zoned for active and passive ports, to ensure successful Live Partition Mobility?
- Utilization: Are my systems overloaded - especially for CPU, memory, capacity, network ports?
Information gathering
BVQ scans topology and performance informations about the IBM PowerVM hypervisors from the REST API of the IBM Power Systems Hardware Management Console (HMC).
What information is collected?
- Topology configuration information
- Scanned every 1 hour (default)
- 49 object types containing a total of ~650 attributes:
HMCs, Systems, VIOSs, LPARs, LAN interfaces, VLANs, Storage volumes, CPU cores, ...
- Performance statistics
- Scanned every 5 minutes (default) (30 seconds interval averages)
- 13 object types containing a total of ~180 performance statistics
Additional information:
- See Supported IBM PowerVM systems (SW) for more information about which HW/SW versions are supported.
- See Scanner for more Information about BVQ Scanner configuration.
- See IBM PowerVM preparation for additional HMC preparation tasks.
- See /wiki/spaces/~557058f85a2b71be2d496e8e4575a825a92089/pages/13831293 about scanned information.
End to end inter platform relations
The BVQ PowerVM platform model is interconnected to the following other platform model supported by BVQ:
| Remote platform | Remote object | PowerVM object |
|---|---|---|
| Spectrum virtualize (Family) | VDisk | System / VIOS PV |
| Dell EMC Unity | LUN | System / VIOS PV |
| NetApp ONTAP | LUN | System / VIOS PV |
| Brocade / Cisco SAN | Node port | System FC port LPAR vFC Client adapter |
| Brocade / Cisco SAN | Zone Member | System FC port LPAR vFC Client adapter |
Object types
The following graphs show the elementary relationships between PowerVM objects.
Hardware objects
Storage objects
Shared storage pool objects
Network objects
Predefined system health checks
The health of your PowerVM systems is shown in the BVQ Systems Health Map inside the Web UI of the BVQ Server.
We started with a set of ~20 general rules permanently checking your systems. Of course you can add your own customized health check rules there, tailored to your environment.
| Predefined Alert rule activation | PowerVM Systems Health Map |
|---|---|
|
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See /wiki/spaces/~557058f85a2b71be2d496e8e4575a825a92089/pages/13831031 for more details.
Predefined web dashboards
BVQ Web Dashboards are based on our BVQ Datasource Plugin for Grafana. We streamlined the experience from many of our SVA PowerVM Experts to predefine three essential dashboards to provide an overview across performance, capacity, CPU core & memory utilization and environmental status:
| HMC Overview | System Overview | LPAR Overview |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
See BVQ for IBM PowerVM monitoring dashboards for more details.
Predefined reports
Our expert PowerVM team designed some reports to provide a general overview about that platform.
See BVQ for IBM PowerVM reports for more details.
BVQ Expert GUI representation
All objects, attributes and statistics of this platform can be interactively browsed within the BVQ Expert GUI. We assembled 6 predefined and commented BVQ Multi view favourites to give you a first overview about your overall, network and storage configuration, your performance load or to guide you through analytic tasks to identify issues around redundant VIOSs or configuration. We will add more as soon, as we identify additional general use cases.
Where to find IBM PowerVM objects?
Similar to all other objects, they show up in the Path browser inside the property panel of the BVQ Expert GUI or can be opened as a Table view from the Favourite browser. All PowerVM objects can be combined in an end to end relation to objects of other platforms.
| PowerVM objects in Path browser | PowerVM object Table views in BVQ Favorites |
|---|---|
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Object attributes
BVQ displays all interesting attributes provided by the HMC. Please explore the BVQ PowewVM table view favourites to get an impression of the most important attributes.
Performance and error statistics
The BVQ PowerVM module gathers all System and LPAR statistics delivered from the HMC.
Typical questions around performance, load and utilization are answered by BVQ:
- Is the LPAR performance negatively affected by the SAN congestion or storage latencies?
- Which LPAR puts a heavy load on a storage volume?
- Does an latency peak have influence on the performance of an LPAR?
- Does LPAR load generate latency peaks in storage
- Is the LPAR or host performance affected by slow drainers in the SAN?
- Which LPAR is used for a SAN port?
To view performance statistics for one or multiple objects, simply select the object(s), right-click and select the performance object type you are interested in.
In the performance chart view, open the properties panel to select the metrics you are interested in:
