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HMC V9 performance improvements

By ANU JALAN posted Mon June 15, 2020 09:01 AM

  

HMC V9 (910 & 920) Performance Improvements

HMC V9 R1 M910 was released earlier this year with the ability to manage POWER9 servers and we rolled out an update (HMC V9 R1 M920) when the POWER9 E950 servers came out. While the V9 release and updates had many new features & enhancements (many of them to address the requirements you had asked for), we have also continued our focus on performance improvements. Let’s take a quick look at the performance enhancements in HMC V9 R1 M910 and HMC V9 R1 M920.

Test Configuration & Methodology

The following setup was used to take the measurement.

  • The measurements done for an HMC (Model: 7042-CR8 with 16GB Memory) managing around 1000 LPARs configured across 2 E880 systems - one with 760 logical partitions and 8 VIOSes and another with remaining partitions.

  • The results are an average of multiple measurements with minimum of 3 executions (in some cases more attempts were made).

  • Measured results were captured within a controlled environment. i.e., keeping HMC usage restricted to single user and no other operations performed on the managed systems and LPARs while measuring (to avoid asynchronous events invalidating the cache).

  • The results might vary based on the configuration and operations being performed on your HMC, but the relative improvements should still hold.

Dashboard Login

Dashboard is the first page which displays “All Servers” managed by HMC as soon as you log to the HMC. We have done some API optimizations to improve the loading time and also to be more resilient to errors in one or more systems.


dashboardLogin

Add and Remove of Physical Adapter to a Partition

We have also done optimizations in the way some internal communications happen to fetch data via the REST API, which will help in improving the response time of all REST APIs. Below is one example in particular where response time have improved for adding or removing Physical IO to/from the partition.

AddRemovePhysicalAdpater

Launch of "Add Adapter" Panel to assign Physical Adapter to a Partition

Launch time after User clicks “Add Adapter” button (after displaying Physical I/O adapters for a partition) to assign a physical adapter to a partition has also been improved.

LaunchAddAdapterPanel

Some of the other areas where performance improvements can be observed are:

  1. Optimizations of event handling flows to reflect changes in Dashboard views.
  2. HMC operation done by custom user (non pre-defined user).
  3. Operations related with modifying Managed system attributes.
  4. Launch of Create Partition Panel

Summary

Since our test environment is not all encompassing, your feedback based on your unique configurations, has been invaluable in helping us identify bottlenecks and drive the above performance improvements in HMC V9. We look forward to your future feedback.

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