Tailoring
Tailoring your solution to the pSeries platform may mean that you want
your application to have the same look and feel that other applications
have on the pSeries platform. This way the application will be familiar
to pSeries and AIX users. Or, alternatively, it may mean that you want your
application to have the same look and feel as it has on other platforms that
it runs on, so that those who are familiar with your software will be comfortable
using it on the new platform. It could be that you want to do both in order
to accommodate both types of users and have the flexibility for the end
user to use your application in different ways, depending on their prior
familiarity with either the pSeries platform or your application. Some influence how the application
looks and feels. Others influence its behavior in set up and operation.
Our goal of this Web site is to remind you to ask all of the questions
that might be interesting to ask, so that when you are done, you will have
confidence in the appeal of your solution to pSeries customers.
Installation and packaging
Installation and packaging of your software on the pSeries platform is
similar to other UNIX platforms and fairly straightforward. We recommend
that you package your software and offer installation options that adhere
to standards: open standards and commonly-used methods for AIX on a pSeries server.
Tools available for packaging and delivering pSeries applications are listed
below:
Operations and System Administration
If you are familiar with other UNIX systems, such as HP-UX or Solaris,
you will find it fairly simple to transition to the AIX operating system.
Traditionally, most UNIX system adminstrators prefer to use a command-line
interface (CLI), but the choice of scripting tools and administrations
tools differ on each UNIX platform. The Korn and the Bourne shells are
the most common shells used on the AIX operating system, whereas some UNIX
systems use the C-shell by default. Perl is a popular scripting language
that is used on AIX as well as other UNIX systems. If your application
makes use of specific administration or scripting tools, you may want to
tailor these to the AIX platform. Here, we provide information on the Korn
shell. Note that if you are using the Korn shell on another UNIX platform, then you may find it easier to use the ksh92 version of Korn shell on AIX. ksh92 supports the KSH 88 standard and is available on AIX by default. It is also possible to include your preferred shell in your installation
and packaging, if you would like to preserve your application's look and
feel from other platforms. For example, if you use the bash shell for scripting
purposes, the bash shell is easily available for AIX, though not installed
by default.
AIX has a comprehensive system administration tool called System
Management Interface Tool (SMIT) which is a graphical-user interface that allows
the system administrator to perform nearly any AIX system task that he
or she requires via menus rather than by the CLI. There is also a tty (non-GUI)
version called smitty (SMIT + tty) which has the same extensive functionality
as SMIT, but also allows the system administrator to perform those tasks
remotely from any terminal.
For users familiar with AIX and SMIT, it is important to tailor your application
to make use of this important tool. As an example, the VERITAS Foundation
Suite for AIX allows the system administrator to perform volume and disk
management tasks either through VERITAS CLI commands or through SMIT menus.
In this way, users who are previously familiar with the VERITAS Foundation
Suite software can find the commands that they know, and users familiar
with AIX can easily use the VERITAS commands in the familiar SMIT environment.
Please see the following references for more information on the SMIT system
management tool.
For system administrators moving from the Windows platform, the Web-based System Manager (WSM) is a useful suite of system management tools. Web-based System Manager,
released with AIX 5L, is a comprehensive suite of system management tools
for AIX 5L. WSM uses an interface which is familiar to Windows users and
administrators, and it minimizes the UNIX-specific concepts. Microsoft
Windows system administrators will find it easy to manage an AIX 5L system
using WSM. If users of your software are comfortable with the Microsoft
Windows platform, you may want to understand WSM and see if it something
that will fit with your software.
pSeries workload management and performance tuning tools
AIX provides several workload management and system monitoring tools as
well as performance tuning tools. A part of tailoring your application
to a new platform is ensuring that your code continues to perform optimally.
Using a combination of these system monitoring and performance tuning tools
will allow you to optimize your solution leading to increased customer
satisfaction.
The Workload Manager (WLM) is a feature included in the base AIX 5L (and 4.3.3) operating system.
It is a tool to manage system workloads and system resources on the pSeries platform. WLM can automate resource administration such as ensuring
critical applications get full resources at peak demands. Resource policies
can be created by the system administrator based on the time or day. WLM
gives you greater control over how the scheduler and virtual memory manager
(VMM) allocate CPU and physical memory resources to processes. In AIX 5L
(5.1, 5.2 and future releases), disk usage can also be controlled by WLM.
This can be used to prevent different classes of jobs from interfering
with each other and to explicitly apply resources based on the requirements
of different groups of users. This feature allows you to take advantage
of server consolidation. See these references for the WLM:
Performance tuning tools are also provided for the AIX operating system. A comprehensive guide to AIX performance tuning is available from IBM Redbooks.
There are two types of tools: those that report on and analyze the system
and those that can change the system performance. Some of the tools do
both. The performance-related commands are packaged as part of the perfagent.tools,
bos.acct, bos.sysmgt.trace, bos.adt.samples, bos.perf.tools, and bos.perf.tune
filesets that are shipped with the base AIX operating system.
Performance reporting and analysis commands include the following:
- curt - Reports CPU utilization for each kernel thread (beginning with AIX 5.2)
- iostat - Displays utilization data for: terminals, CPU, disks, and adapters
- iptrace - Provides interface-level packet tracing for Internet protocols
- no - Displays (or changes) the values of network options, such as: default
send and receive socket buffer sizes, maximum total amount of memory used
in mbuf and cluster pools
- ps - Displays statistics and status information about the processes in the
system, such as: Process ID, I/O activity, CPU utilization
- sar - Displays statistics on operating-system activity, such as: directory
accesses, read and write system calls, forks and execs, paging activity
- smitty - Displays (or changes) system-management parameters
- splat - Lock contention analysis tool
- svmon - Reports on the status of memory at system, process, and segment levels
- topas - Reports selected local system statistics. Similar to top on Solaris.
- tprof - Uses the trace facility to report the CPU consumption of kernel services, library subroutines, application-program modules, and individual lines of source code in the application program
- trace, trcrpt - Writes a file that records the exact sequence of activities within the system
- traceroute - Prints the route that IP packets take to a network host
The full list of performance reporting and analysis commands:
Performance tuning commands include the following::
- bindprocessor - Binds or unbinds the kernel threads of a process to a processor
- chdev - Changes the characteristics of a device
- fdpr - A performance tuning utility for improving execution time and real memory utilization of user-level application programs
- ifconfig - Configures or displays network interface parameters for a network using TCP/IP
- ioo - Sets I/O related tuning parameters
- migratepv - Moves allocated physical partitions from one physical volume to one or more other physical volumes
- mkps - Adds an additional paging space to the system
- nfso - Configures Network File System (NFS) network variables
- renice - Alters the nice value of running processes
- reorgvg - Reorganizes the physical partition allocation for a volume group
- rmss - Simulates a system with various sizes of memory for performance testing of applications
- smitty - Changes (or displays) system-management parameters
- vmo - Sets VMM related tuning parameters
The full list of performance tuning commands:
Also, see these performance tuning tools and tutorials:
AIX security references
AIX provides enterprise-level security in a flexible yet reliable manner.
Different levels of authority can be set up (other than the 'root' user)
to handle such tasks as print queue or user management separately which
allows the safe delegation of authority. The flexibility of the AIX operating
system allows the system administrator to tailor each AIX system to the
level of security required for each server. The links provided below offer
system administrators guidelines and principles by which they should implement
security on AIX. Also, there are links for using IBM's SecureWay Directory
and also to CheckPoint's VPN-1 and FireWall-1 product for AIX. Depending
on your software, understanding how security is implemented on AIX may
be crucial to your application running on the pSeries platform.
AIX Security Resources:
Internationalization references and tools
In today's global economy, it's important that you consider the internationalization or localization of your code. When your code is internationalized or localized for countries
around the world, it will not only support different character sets
such as Chinese or Cyrillic, but also support different date and calendar
formats. Whether you currently have customers globally or planning for them in the future , internationalization
of your code is something you should consider. Below are some basic references
to get you started with internationalization. One tool that you may want
to review is an open source tool called ICU (International Components for
Unicode). See the ICU FAQ link below for more information:
Problem Management tools and references
There is a centralized pSeries support Web site which has links to problem
solving and support information. Below is a link to that site as well as
other links that you may find useful in tailoring your problem solving
methods to AIX.
- pSeries Support - contains many links to problem solving information
- Fix Delivery Center for AIX5L - Download the latest AIX5L fixes here
- Linux Support - Download fixes here for all Linux distributions
- AIX database search - Search closed and solved AIX issues
- pSeries support subscription service - Subscribe to bulletins and alerts on latest available fixes
- RootVG.net - Third-party Web site with comprehensive AIX information. See 'Problem
Solving' section in the left navigation bar.
User Interface references
One method of tailoring your application to AIX is to tailor your user
interfaces to be more closely aligned with what AIX users expect. The other
possibility is to have your application's interfaces be consistent across
all platforms. Whichever method is most appropriate for your software,
you can take a look at this reference guide available for learning how
to program user interfaces in AIX. Also, we include information below on
the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) which is the default desktop environment
for AIX. Other desktop environments can be used on AIX, such as KDE.
Database references
All the large database vendors' software are available on AIX, such as
Oracle, DB2, and Informix. Tailoring for AIX should not be necessary, and
you should find the same functionality you find on any other UNIX platform.
For more information see:
Printing tools and references
Standard UNIX print commands are available on AIX, and tailoring is not
necessary for the AIX platform. For more information on printing, see the
AIX documentation
Licensing information
Generally, the licensing software on AIX is integrated into the main system
administration tool, SMIT. It is possible to manage licenses directly from
within SMIT, not only for the operating system, but also for the compilers
and other software. Some third-party licensing products that are widely
available for UNIX systems are also available on AIX, such as Flexlm available from Macrovision.
IBM software products generally use the License Use Management (LUM) tool. This is integrated into SMIT. For more information on LUM, please see the main LUM Web site at: ibm.com/software/is/lum/
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