POWER8 and AIX Enhancements (AN050)

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About this Course

This non-workshop course is designed to provide continuing education for system administrators who have extensive experience with previous levels of POWER hardware, PowerVM, and AIX. It covers various enhancements to POWER hardware and firmware and to the AIX operating system. It starts with an overview of POWER8 architecture and equipment. It then proceeds with discussions on various software and firmware enhancements (including PowerVM 2.2.3 and AIX 7.1 TL3). These enhancements include eight thread SMT, simplified SEA configuration, SR-IOV support, and other enhancements.

For a workshop course with hands-on lab exercises, attend POWER8 and AIX Enhancements Workshop (AN090). The workshop course will often lag behind POWER8 and AIX Enhancements (AN050) in receiving the latest updates, but has the advantage of hands-on exercises. There can be significant overlap in discussion content between AN050 and AN090, depending upon where these courses are in their update cycles; read the course descriptions carefully. To learn only the very latest enhancements, attendance at IBM Technical conferences or symposiums is recommended.

Audience Profile

This advanced course is for anyone responsible for system administrative duties including implementing and managing IBM POWER7+ or POWER8 servers running AIX 7.1

At Course Completion

Upon completing this course, students will be able to:

  • Discuss the POWER8 hardware
  • Discuss and manage eight thread simultaneous multithreading
  • Discuss HMC enhancements
  • Discuss PowerVM enhancements
  • Discuss SR-IOV

Prerequisites

You must have basic AIX, LPAR, and PowerVM system administration experience. The AIX prerequisite can be met by attending one of the following classes or you can have equivalent AIX skills:

  • Power Systems for AIX II: AIX Implementation and Administration (AN120)
  • AIX Jumpstart for UNIX Professionals (AN140)

The LPAR and PowerVM prerequisite can be met by attending the following class or you can have equivalent LPAR skills.

  • Power Systems for AIX - Virtualization I: Implementing Virtualization (AN300)

 

Course Outline

Day 1

  • Welcome
  • Unit 1 - What’s new in POWER hardware Unit 2 - PowerVM and HMC enhancements

Day 2

  • Unit 2 - PowerVM and HMC enhancements (continued)
  • Unit 3 - SMT enhancements
  • Unit 4 - Miscellaneous AIX enhancements