DB2 Connect servers are usually a good target for consolidation. Recently we observed relatively high CPU utilization even though only a small workload was being used. The oprofile and strace output showed that the system was busy doing semget() calls … Read the rest
CPU and memory resources are normally shared in a virtualized environment. Therefore multiple guests are fighting for the same resources. Before the release of SLES11 SP2 and RHEL6.2 the automatic management of the number of virtual CPUs and the memory … Read the rest
IBM has published a new Redpaper covering the so called “silent mode” installation of Oracle. This installation method eliminates the GUI and user input during installation. Instead all parameters are specified in a file. Note that this applies to the … Read the rest
Dan Horák from Red Hat announced the availability of the latest Fedora release for System z today. Congratulations to the team for making this available shortly after the release on the Intel platform!
The download is available from the Fedoraproject … Read the rest
Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 6.3. The kernel level is now kernel-2.6.32-279.el6, for the main bug fixes see the kernel update description.
As usual there are the release notes and the technical notes in two separate … Read the rest
A number of people asked me about the supported Linux distributions for the Intel blade based zEnterprise BladeCenter Extensions. For this information look at
Did you have any memory problems with your applications recently? Wild accesses, improperly initialized variables, memory leaks, illegal frees etc sounds familiar? Then you should take a look at valgrind. It’s now available for Linux on System z as … Read the rest
Ever wondered why your Java application is not running as smooth as it should in a virtualized environment? There are multiple reasons for this and so Steve Wehr gives some explanation for this in this new whitepaper. This isn’t … Read the rest
Since a few years no System z offers hardware support for decimal floating point operations as defined by IEEE 754-2008. This allows for exact and very fast calculations in the decimal (and not the normal binary) system in the … Read the rest
This new whitepaper addresses the question if one should do a 1:1 consolidation or putting more than one server into a zLinux guest from a performance perspective. The sweet spot for the setup used here was at 10 JVMs per … Read the rest