Specific requirements and notes for AIX VIOS systems - syncsort_capacity_management - 12.60

VIOS systems are generally regarded as “black box” environments by IBM. Responding to Syncsort™ Capacity Management customer requests, Precisely worked with IBM to evaluate the AIX Acquire in a VIOS environment. As a result it was given the “VIOS Recognized” status, meaning it conforms to the functional and security requirements necessary to be permitted in a VIOS environment.

There are certain VIOS specific actions needed to install and run Acquire for AIX as detailed here.

• Create a ‘metron’ user with access to the unrestricted shell. By default all normal users of a VIOS system are presented with a cut-down shell environment. Acquire cannot work in this, and needs to have access to the standard AIX shell. Installation then proceeds as documented later in this chapter. The specific details of this are as follows, assuming the userid to be used is metron:

• From the padmin user, create the Acquire userid with the command: mkuser metron

• Issue oem_setup_env to move to the unrestricted shell in padmin

• Issue the command chuser shell=’/usr/bin/sh’ metron to give the metron use­rid access to the un-restricted shell

• Enter smitty and select Security and Users, then change the metron user to be part of the group necessary to run the sar command, normally group adm

• Locate the /var/adm/cron directory. If a file called cron.allow exists, you must open this with vi and add the metron user id to the list, or else it will not be permitted to use the crontab command

• Go to the root directory by issuing the command cd /

• List the contents of root’s profile by issuing the command type .profile and copy the contents to the clipboard

• Type exit to leave the un-restricted shell, then log off and log on to the metron user – you will be required to change the password on first logon

• By default a normal user’s .profile is a link to /usr/ios/cli/.profile and you will be unable to change it. To rectify this, issue the command:

  mv .profile profile_old

  to break the link and take a copy of the file.

• Create a new .profile file with vi .profile, then press the i key to enter insert mode

• Paste the contents of the root .profile into this new file, then type :wq! to save it

• Log off and log back on to the metron user to implement the new profile

The metron user should now have access to all the commands needed to install and run Acquire.

You can test this by issuing the following commands:

tar

sar -u 2 2

crontab -l

• If any of these commands fail with not found or insufficient authority, review the steps above to ensure that all have completed successfully.

• Do not attempt to use Process Accounting. VIOS provides an I/O service to client systems, and as such is a single-function system. Process Accounting is not available in a VIOS environment, but should not be necessary anyway.

•  (Optional but preferable) Remove access to ‘metron’ user after installation is proven. Once installation has completed, the VIOS administrator can remove interactive access to the metron userid if required, so long as access is retained by Control Center using whatever data transfer method has been chosen.

When examining data captured from a VIOS system and its clients, be aware of the following:

• Acquire is not able to gather information from virtual network devices from the VIOS side. This is because they do not have an IP address, and therefore are invisible to the ‘netstat’ command. NIC traffic is visible as normal from the client side.

• There is no currently means of automatically mapping virtual disks or network links in a VIOS client to their physical counterparts in the VIOS system.

• There is a known IBM bug in VIOS 1.5 with Fix Pack 11.1 that breaks ‘sar’ when writing reports from binary data, as Acquire does. You must apply a service pack to the VIOS environment to bring the operating system level up to 5300-08-01-0819 or later. This service pack can be found here:http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/vios/vios15/download/servicepacks.html.

  If you do not do this, Acquire’s ‘sar’ files will contain only headings and mes­sages like those highlighted below and you will see Control Center generate error messages when processing them.

  # 2009/07/07 12:14:00

  Uptime  12:14PM  up  3:06, 2 users, load average: 0.33, 0.48, 0.42

  Page size: 4096

  Physical memory: 4096 * 524288

  AIX ps0380a 3 5 00CF31FC4C00  07/07/09

  System configuration: lcpu=2 ent=0.50 mode=Uncapped

  12:12:00 cpu  %usr  %sys  %wio  %idle  physc  %entc

  System configuration changed. The current iteration values may be inaccurate.

  AIX ps0380a 3 5 00CF31FC4C00  07/07/09

  System configuration: lcpu=2 ent=0.50 mode=Uncapped

  12:12:00 iget/s lookuppn/s dirblk/s

  System configuration changed. The current iteration values may be inaccurate.