IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - February/March 2009 - (Page 28)
Administrator Getting the most from your systems Managing AIX Updates BY KEN MILBERG hen I hear my friends discuss NASCAR and high-performance racing, I can’t help but think about how I can get my AIX* server boxes to perform at a higher level. In the context of systems management, this doesn’t always correlate into increased systems performance, but rather increased availability and reliability. How does managing Technology Level (TL) upgrades, service packs and firmware upgrades correlate to overall systems management? It’s actually ver y simple. Without a carefully designed service management plan, you aren’t effectively performing your job as a systems manager. The primary job of an AIX administrator used to be worrying about upgrades—things like maintenancelevel upgrades, security patches, firmware, etc. In recent years, with the advent of Power* Systems, much has changed in this area. Today, UNIX* administrators get involved in virtualization, server consolidation, architectural design and capacity planning. Does that mean the days of worrying about updates are over? Far from it. What it does mean is some of the methods used to achieve your goal of reliable, up-to-date systems may have changed a bit. In this ar ticle I’ll examine best practices for managing updates to your Power Systems running A I X i n f r a s t r uc t u r e —i nc lud i n g T L upg r ade s , service packs, systems firmware and the Hardware Management Console (HMC). W SUMA Let’s first review the Service Update Management Assistant (SUMA)–first released with AIX 5.3. SUMA helps the system administrator avoid the mundane tasks of manually retrieving updates from the Web. It allows you to configure policies to automatically download APARs or even entire TL upgrades. The goal is to spend less time on system administration by having work done automatically–while at the same time ensuring systems have the current fixes 28 F E B R U A R Y/ M A R C H 2 0 0 9 i b m s y s t e m s m a g.c o m/a i x available. It does this using a scheduling module, which allows policies to be run at predefined intervals that conform to your maintenance window. These polices can be set without extensive configuration. In fact, all that’s required is the fix type. The eight kinds of fix-types include: APAR, PTF, critical, security, latest (all fixes), filesets (specific types), SPs and TLs. Three types of actions can take place on a given policy. They include preview, download, and download and clean. Preview doesn’t download any filesets; it generates a preview of what would be downloaded. The download performs the download, while the download and clean removes filesets that aren’t needed after a new fix level has been brought down. This helps limit the size of the data you must keep. You can run suma from either smit or the command line. In this case, we’ll use smit. Select “Download updates,” then choose “Enter.” Let’s download all the available fixes for your system. Scroll down, and choose “Download all latest fixes.” You’ll be prompted to confirm you want to go further. It took about 10 minutes to complete the download. Why is SUMA important? It helps ensure your systems have the latest patches. It downloads the patches without intervention, which allows the system administrator to focus on more important tasks. Let’s talk about methodology. Though we sometimes use the phrase “maintenance-level upgrades,” TL upgrades have replaced them for several years. TLs denote AIX releases that contain both hardware and software features. These are now released twice annually. The f irst TL is restricted to hardware features and software ser vices, while the second includes new ha rdwa re feat u res and sof t wa re features, in addition to software services. Suffice to say, the second release is larger. A PTF is a specific fix. A service pack, which contains groups of PTFs, contains fixes for highly pervasive issues. Service packs are cumulative and are usually released every six to eight weeks after the release of a new TL.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - February/March 2009
IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - February/March 2009
Table of Contents
Editor's Desk: Cooking Up a Management Solution
Trends: IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager 4.1 Evolves to Offer Improved Savings and Manageability
Case Study: Wakefern Food Corporation exchanges an aging solution…to accelerate data transfers
Cover Story: Managing It All
Features: The relationship between virtual and physical resources on Power Systems
Tips & Techniques: Using File-Backed Virtual SCSI Devices
Administrator: Managing AIX Updates
Product News
Advertiser Index
Power Systems Perspective: Weathering the Storm
IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - February/March 2009
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