IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009 - 36

Administrator Getting the most from your systems Performance Toolkit for z/VM BY ARUNKUMAAR RAMACHANDRAN AND SHIRANG B KULKARNI i r t ua l i zat ion of I T s y ste m s i s ga i n i ng more currency with the increase in large enterprises that are adopting green IT features to reduce their carbon footprint. With its virtualization capabilities, the System z* mainframe is the platform of choice for virtualization. The z/VM* OS, the mother of all virtualization technologies, forms the backbone of virtualization on the platform. For effective virtualization, it becomes important to monitor the health of z/VM and its guests. Performance Toolkit (PTK) for z/VM is one monitoring product available. This ar ticle provides an over view of P T K a nd how to con f ig u re it u si ng a si mplesetup scenario. PTK is an optional-priced product that runs on z/ V M, prov iding real-time f ull-screen console operations and real-time performance monitoring of z/VM and its guests. It also has facilities to archive performance data for historical data processing, which may be handy for capacity-planning exercises. PTK is installed with z/VM and must be enabled in z / V M s y s te m con f ig u r at ion befor e u se. L e t ’s focus on t he per for mance-monitor ing aspects of PTK. PTK runs as a guest user (interchangeably referred to as virtual machine, user ID or guest) and invokes a Conversational Monitor System (CMS) module called PERFKIT. To view performance data and do monitoring, PTK provides 3270 (see Figure 1, page 38) and Web interfaces (see Figure 2, page 38). V s We’re using z/VM (with system name VMA) in native LPAR mode in a System z box. s z/OS guests are running in the z/VM. s Only minidisks are used. s Performance data is collected to perform capacity planning. s Detailed performance reports are required for certain guests. s System-wide data is archived and retained for more than the default period of three days. Cer tain custom izat ions to cont rol f i les and parameters are required for PTK to work. These may vary slightly depending on the z/VM version. For this exercise, version V5R2 is used. Some definitions stick to default and some may be installation specific; such definitions aren’t considered. In this article, while discussing the PTK configuration steps, only the changed parameters are shown. Guest User IDs for PTK Two guest user IDs are associated with PT K for z/VM and entries for them are created in z/VM user director when PTK is installed. The guest user IDs are: 5VMPTK20 user, which is used during installation and for subsequent servicing and PERFSVM user ID, which runs PERFKIT module. Separate and sufficient minidisks are defined for keeping performance and historical data files; these definitions appear in PERFSVM user directory entry: User perfsvm xxxxxx 64m 512m abdeg … … mdisk 191 3390 0001 9980 perf01 wr read write multi mdisk 204 3390 0001 9980 perf02 wr read write multi Implementation T he fol low i ng si mple sce na r io shows how to configure PTK. Figure 3 (page 38) shows general CPU load and user transaction, option 1 of the PTK main menu. It’s assumed PTK is already installed along with z/V M, and has been enabled in the system-configuration file. In this scenario: 36 M A R C H/A PRIL 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com/mainframe

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IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009

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