AIX 5L System Administration III: Performance Management

Please Note: This class is subject to a ten percent increase. Please contact a TrainingPage representative for verification of price increase.

Description:

Gain the skills to measure, analyze, and tune AIX subsystems on IBM eServer pSeries hardware for optimum performance. Learn how to manage the performance of AIX 5L and the performance of applications running under AIX 5L. Examine performance management concepts and techniques and the use of standard AIX tools (sar, iostat, vmstat, netstat, and tuning commands such as schedo, vmo, no and ioo). Also, learn to use advanced AIX performance tools (tprof, svmon, and filemon). Learn how to run and use the Performance Problem Reporting tool (PerfPMR) to document and then analyze performance problems.  In extensive hands-on lab exercises, reinforce each lecture and gain practical experience applicable to your performance management requirements.

Hands-On Labs

Labs are included to address working with tunable files, Central Processing Unit (CPU), virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM), Input/Output (I/O) performance, physical and logical storage, Input/Output (I/O) performance, file systems, network performance, Network File System (NFS) performance. Many labs have a special focus on the use of the PerfPMR facility and the use of its files to analyze problems.

Audience:

This is an advanced course for system administrators, system engineers, and system support individuals.

Objectives:

• Distinguish between system and application performance constraints
• Describe the performance implications of each subsystem by understanding, in general terms, how the subsystem works
• Identify and eliminate (or minimize) various software and hardware performance constraints using AIX 5L tools and standard UNIX tools
• List various sources of information and support for capacity planning, system assurance, performance analysis and tuning

Prerequisites:

You should complete:

• AIX System Administration I : Implementation (AU140) or (Q1314)
• AIX System Administration II : Problem Determination (AU160) or (Q1316) or (QT010)
• AIX 5L TCP/IP I: Configuration (AU070) or (Q1307)

or have equivalent experience (at least six months)

You should also be able to:

• Manage AIX physical and logical storage
• Manage networking configurations from an application server viewpoint.
• Utilize additional subsystems including cron to schedule system tasks and accounting to analyze system activity
• Pull together many of the topics learned in previous courses to start addressing real-life system administrator issues

Topics:

Performance analysis and tuning overview

• describe performance terminology
• explain performance components
• describe the performance tuning process
• explain performance metrics
• list tools available for analysis and tuning

Data Collection

• distinguish between a performance and a functional problem
• provide a clear description of a performance problem
• install the PerfPMR tool
• collect performance data using PerfPMR
• describe the use of topas and nmon performance monitoring tools.

Monitoring, analyzing and tuning Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage

• explain processes and threads
• explain how priorities and scheduling work
• use the output of vmstat, sar, ps, topas, and tprof to determine symptoms of a CPU bottleneck
• use schedo options to tune CPU scheduling
• enable/disable simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)

Virtual memory performance monitoring and tuning

• explain basic virtual memory concepts and what issues affect performance
• explain how to analyze memory usage
• explain page replacement
• analyze and tune page replacement
• identify memory leaks
• use Virtual Memory Management (VMM) monitoring and tuning tools

Physical and logical volume performance

• identify factors related to physical and logical volume performance
• use performance tools to identify I/O bottlenecks
• configure physical disks and adapters for optimal performance
• configure logical volumes for optimal performance

File system performance monitoring and tuning

• list characteristics of the file system that apply to performance
• describe how file fragmentation affects disk I/O performance
• use the filemon tool to evaluate file system performance
• tune asynchronous I/O, synchronous I/O and Journaled File System (JFS) log
• tune direct I/O and release-behind
• tune page read-ahead and write-behind
• identify resource bottlenecks

Network performance

• list the factors and system parameters that affect network performance
• measure network throughput and response time
• use netstat to monitor network statistics
• use no, chdev, ifconfig, and smit to tune network performance

NFS performance

• define the basic NFS concepts
• list the differences between NFS V2, V3 and V4
• tune NFS servers
• tune NFS clients

Performance Management Methodology

• list the steps to approach performance analysis
• describe the distinct areas of performance that need to be investigated and how to go about monitoring those areas
• use tools that will aid with performance monitoring and tuning on partitioned system