Mt Xia: Technical Consulting Group

Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery / High Availability
Data Center Automation / Audit Response / Audit Compliance

Additional documents of interest

  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 1 - Users and Groups
    This article was published in the April 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses system administration needs and requirements oriented around users and groups. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters, such as user names, group names, UID and GID numbers.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 2 - Machine and Host Names
    This article was published in the May 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for machines, systems, adapters, and aliases. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 3 - Volume Names
    This article was published in the December 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for volume groups, logical volumes, log logical volumes, directory mount points, etc. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 4 - MQ Series, Startup/Shutdown Scripts, Error Processing
    This article was published in the April 2006 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses how to implement AIX in an environment dedicated to business continuity. The topic of this article is the assignment of MQ Series queue names and aliases, resource group startup and shutdown script names (Application startup/shutdown script names), error logging, and error notification.
  • Successful Business Continuity - Part 5 - Miscellaneous topics
    This article was published in the August 2006 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses how to implement AIX in an environment dedicated to business continuity. A variety of topics is discussed in this article including automated documentation generation and management.
  • Automated Microcode Management System
    One of the most difficult administration tasks in an AIX environment is attempting to keep the firmware and microcode up-to-date. Mt Xia has devised an automated method of gathering the Microcode information, determining which microcode needs to be updated, generating reports, and uploading the required microcode updates to each individual system.
  • Calculating the size of a Virtual Processor
    This document describes the algorithms used to calculate the size of a virtual processor when using shared processors in an LPAR. The IBM documentation describes how to calculate CPU utilization, NOT how to size for configuration, this document clarifies this process. A description of the HMC input fields for the processor tab is included.
  • Basics of Partition Load Manager Setup
    This presentation was provided by Ron Barker from IBM regarding the PLM Basic setup.
  • ppt
  • pdf
  • Storage Standards

    All operating system, application, and data storage in the Mt Xia environment shall be configured external to the system. The purpose of this is to increase the recoverability of the system, reduce hardware related outages, and to centralize the management of storage.

    All systems will have multiple hardware paths to the storage, those paths may be physical or virtual.

    Multiple volume groups shall be created in the AIX environment. The operating system volume group, called "rootvg", will contain only operating system related applications and files. The "rootvg" will contain a minimum amount of storage.

    The standard "rootvg" will contain a single 9 GB disk that exists on the SAN and is mirrored by the SAN environment. Multiple paths to the "rootvg" disk are configured using IBM's Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) device driver. Optionally, the "rootvg" may have an "alt_disk" that exists on internal storage. The "alt_disk" is used to perform Operating System updates.

    All non-operating system related programs and data will be stored in volume groups other than "rootvg". The Volume group names will be created in accordance with Mt Xia's VG naming standards and will contain storage as required by the supported business function.

    All non-rootvg volume groups residing on Hitachi SAN based storage will utilize the latest HDLM driver and multiple hardware paths to the SAN. The HDLM driver is updated on a regular basis.

    Further information regarding Mt Xia's storage standards can be obtained from the following document: Unix-Storage-Presentation.pdf

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