Develop the skills to measure, analyze, and tune common performance issues on IBM Power Systems running AIX.

Learn about performance management concepts and techniques and how to use the basic AIX tools to monitor, analyze, and tune an AIX system. The course covers how virtualization technologies such as the PowerVM environment and workload partitions affect AIX performance management. Monitoring and analyzing tools discussed in this course include vmstat, iostat, sar, tprof, svmon, netstat, lvmstat, and topas. Tuning tools include schedo, vmo, ioo, no, and nfso.

The course also covers how to use Performance Problem Reporting (PerfPMR) to capture a variety of performance data for later analysis.

Each lecture is reinforced with extensive hands-on lab exercises which provide practical experience.

The lecture materials include AIX 7.1 enhancements and the exercises are executed in an AIX 7.1 lab environment.

Day 1

• Unit 1 - Performance analysis and tuning overview
• Exercise 1 - Working with tunable files
• Unit 2 - Data collection
• Exercise 2 - Data collection
• Unit 3 - Monitoring, analyzing, and tuning CPU usage
• Exercise 3 - Monitoring, analyzing, and tuning CPU usage (parts 1 and 2)

Day 2

• Exercise 3 - Monitoring, analyzing, and tuning CPU usage (parts 3, 4 and 5)
• Unit 4 - Virtual memory performance monitoring and tuning
• Exercise 4 - Virtual memory performance monitoring and tuning
• Student's choice optional exercise from exercise 3 or exercise 4

Day 3

• Unit 5 - Physical and logical volume performance
• Exercise 5 - Physical and logical volume performance
• Unit 6 - File system performance monitoring and tuning (topic 1)
• Exercise 6 - File system performance monitoring and tuning (parts 1, 2, and 3)

Day 4

• Unit 6 - File system performance monitoring and tuning (topic 2)
• Exercise 6 - File system performance monitoring and tuning (part 4)
• Unit 7 - Network performance
• Exercise 7 - Network performance
• Student's choice optional exercise from exercises 3, 4, or 6

Day 5

• Unit 8 - NFS performance
• Exercise 8 - NFS performance tuning
• Unit 9 - Performance management methodology
• Exercise 9 - Summary exercise
• Student's choice optional exercises from exercises 3, 4, 6, or 7