Performance Navigator 2.5 Supports V4R4 LPAR Initiatives
When IBM released V4R4 last month, one of the new features included in the operating system was the availability of Logical Partitioning (LPAR). Coinciding with the release of V4R4, Midrange Performance Group (Boulder, Colo.) recently announced the release of Performance Navigator 2.5, which adds modeling and monitoring of logical partitions to the product's Professional Edition.
A Windows-based product available in both Professional and Standard editions, Performance Navigator 2.5 gives customers dynamic access to performance data that resides on AS/400s.
The ability to support modeling of LPARs while consolidating workloads of individual AS/400s is a feature that was not included in any of the previous releases, says Randy Watson, president of Midrange Performance Group. In a matter of minutes, a user can determine if a proposed configuration of CPU resources allocated to a partition can sufficiently handle the overall and interactive workloads. "Performance Navigator 2.5 helps users configure LPARs by answering two important questions -- how many processors to each partition? And what percentage of interactive feature code do users have to give to each partition?" he adds.
Performance Navigator 2.5 will also monitor LPAR performance, providing graphs and reports on each partition's performance metrics. According to Watson, there are more than 40 graphs and reports available, which can be accessed on four different levels [that refer to specific times]: specific times, such as every hour; daily; weekly, or monthly.
A feature called "What If" is available only in the Professional edition of Performance Navigator 2.5. This function allows users to model their current workload on any AS/400 and project utilization based on the customer adjusted trends. Watson says the "What If" feature can tell a customer what a CPU looks like presently and what it will look like in the future, for example.
--J. Martin