This IBM® Redbooks® publication addresses performance tuning topics to help leverage the virtualization strengths of the POWER® platform to solve clients’ system resource utilization challenges, and maximize system throughput and capacity. We examine the performance monitoring tools, utilities, documentation, and other resources available to help technical teams provide optimized business solutions and support for applications running on IBM POWER systems’ virtualized environments.

The book offers application performance examples deployed on IBM Power Systems™ utilizing performance monitoring tools to leverage the comprehensive set of POWER virtualization features: Logical Partitions (LPARs), micro-partitioning, active memory sharing, workload partitions, and more. We provide a well-defined and documented performance tuning model in a POWER system virtualized environment to help you plan a foundation for scaling, capacity, and optimization.

This book targets technical professionals (technical consultants, technical support staff, IT Architects, and IT Specialists) responsible for providing solutions and support on IBM POWER systems, including performance tuning.

This book was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center.

Dino Quintero is an IBM Senior Certified IT Specialist with the ITSO in Poughkeepsie, NY. His areas of knowledge include enterprise continuous availability, enterprise systems management, system virtualization, and technical computing and clustering solutions. He is currently an Open Group Distinguished IT Specialist. Dino holds a Master of Computing Information Systems degree and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Marist College.

Sebastien Chabrolles is an IT Specialist at the Product and Solution Support Center in Montpellier, France. His main activity is to perform pre-sales customer benchmarks on Power Systems in the European Benchmark Center. He graduated from a Computer Engineering school (ESIEA) and has 10 years of experience in AIX® and Power Systems. His areas of expertise include IBM Power Systems, PowerVM®, AIX, and Linux.

Chi Hui Chen is a Senior IT Specialist at the IBM Advanced Technical Skills (ATS) team in China. He has more than eight years of experience in IBM Power Systems. He provides AIX support to GCG ISVs in the areas of application design, system performance tuning, problem determination, and application benchmarks. He holds a degree in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China.

Murali Dhandapani is a Certified IT Specialist in Systems Management in IBM India. He is working for the IBM India Software Lab Operations team, where he is a technical lead for IBM Rational® Jazz™ products infrastructure, high availability, and disaster recovery deployment. His areas of expertise include Linux, AIX, IBM POWER virtualization, PowerHA® SystemMirror®, System Management, and Rational tools. Murali has a Master of Computer Science degree. He is an IBM developerWorks® Contributing Author, IBM Certified Specialist in System p® administration and an IBM eServer™ Certified Systems Expert - pSeries® High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (IBM HACMP™).

Talor Holloway is a senior technical consultant working for Advent One, an IBM business partner in Melbourne, Australia. He has worked extensively with AIX and Power Systems and System p for over seven years. His areas of expertise include AIX, NIM, PowerHA, PowerVM, IBM Storage, and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager.

Chandrakant Jadhav is an IT Specialist working at IBM India. He is working for the IBM India Software Lab Operations team. He has over five years of experience in System P, Power Virtualization. His areas of expertise include AIX, Linux, NIM, PowerVM, IBM Storage, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

Sae Kee Kim is a Senior Engineer at Samsung SDS in Korea. He has 13 years of experience in AIX Administration and five years of Quality Control in the ISO20000 field. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from Dankook University in Korea. His areas of expertise include IBM Power Systems and IBM AIX administration.

Sijo Kurian is a Project Manager in IBM Software Labs in India. He has seven years of experience in AIX and Power Systems. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science. He is an IBM Certified Expert in AIX, HACMP and Virtualization technologies.His areas of expertise include IBM Power Systems, AIX, PowerVM, and PowerHA.

Bharath Raj is a Performance Architect for Enterprise Solutions from Bangalore, India. He works with the software group and has over five years of experience in the performance engineering of IBM cross-brand products, mainly in WebSphere® Application Server integration areas. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of RVCE, Bangalore, India. His areas of expertise include performance benchmarking IBM products, end-to-end performance engineering of enterprise solutions, performance architecting, designing solutions, and sizing capacity for solutions with IBM product components. He wrote many articles that pertain to performance engineering in developerWorks and in international science journals.

Ronan Resende is a System Analyst at Banco do Brasil in Brazil. He has 10 years of experience with Linux and three years of experience in IBM Power Systems. His areas of expertise include IBM AIX, Linux in pSeries, and zSeries® (z/VM®).

Bjorn Roden is a Systems Architect for IBM STG Lab Services and is part of the IBM PowerCare Teams working with High End Enterprise IBM Power Systems for clients. He has co-authored seven other IBM Redbooks publications, been speaker at IBM Technical events. Bjorn holds MSc, BSc and DiplSSc in Informatics from Lund University in Sweden, and BCSc and DiplCSc in Computer Science from Malmo University in Sweden. He also has certifications as IBM Certified Infrastructure Systems Architect (ISA), Certified TOGAF Architect, Certified PRINCE2 Project Manager, and Certified IBM Advanced Technical Expert, IBM Specialist and IBM Technical Leader since 1994. He has worked with designing, planning, implementing, programming, and assessing high availability, resiliency, security, and high performance systems and solutions for Power/AIX since AIX v3.1 1990.

Niranjan Srinivasan is a software engineer with the client enablement and systems assurance team.

Richard Wale is a Senior IT Specialist working at the IBM Hursley Lab, UK. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) degree in Computer Science from Portsmouth University, England. He has over 12 years of experience supporting AIX. His areas of expertise include IBM Power Systems, PowerVM, AIX, and IBM i.

William Zanatta is an IT Specialist working in the Strategic Outsourcing Delivery at IBM Brazil. He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Universidade Metodista de Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has over 10 years of experience in supporting different UNIX platforms, and his areas of expertise include IBM Power Systems, PowerVM, PowerHA, AIX and Linux.

Zhi Zhang is an Advisory Software Engineer in IBM China. He has more than 10 years of experience in the IT field. He is a certified DB2® DBA. His areas of expertise include IBM AIX, DB2 and WebSphere Application Performance Tuning. He is currently working in the IBM software group as performance QA.

Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this project:

Ella Buslovich, Richard Conway, Octavian Lascu, Ann Lund, Alfred Schwab, and Scott Vetter
International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center

Gordon McPheeters, Barry Knapp, Bob Maher and Barry Spielberg
IBM Poughkeepsie

Mark McConaughy, David Sheffield, Khalid Filali-Adib, Rene R Martinez, Sungjin Yook, Vishal C Aslot, Bruce Mealey, Jay Kruemcke, Nikhil Hedge, Camilla McWilliams, Calvin Sze, and Jim Czenkusch
IBM Austin

Stuart Z Jacobs, Karl Huppler, Pete Heyrman, Ed Prosser
IBM Rochester

Linda Flanders
IBM Beaverton

Rob Convery, Tim Dunn and David Gorman
IBM Hursley

Nigel Griffiths and Gareth Coates
IBM UK

Yaoqing Gao
IBM Canada

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