1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 1
2. SHARE Presentations Online
3. Two Important APARs
1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 1
The sixty-nine page 2010 No. 1 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on March 5th. This issue is almost double the size of our usual newsletter, but we didn’t want to split up this valuable information on reviewing IEASYSxx. You may visit our Web site at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information. The following is our Management Summary page from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
How to Maximize SHARE
We recently sent out Cheryl’s List #139 (reprinted on page 64) describing some of the ways your SHARE attendee(s) could maximize the benefits of the upcoming SHARE conference. Most of the same tips are also useful for those who can’t make it to the conference (in Seattle March 14-19). If your budget is too tight this year for travel, consider signing up for the new online virtual SHARE. For $490, your staff can attend or view 24 hours of webinars showing the keynote speakers and some of the most popular sessions. In any case, we hope that you will allocate some office time to allow your staff to take advantage of this information in order to keep up with the evolving technology changes, changes occurring at your site! It’s an important strategic move that you shouldn’t miss.
For the Techies
The majority of this newsletter describes the rest of the IEASYSxx parameters, started in the last issue. We provide a recommendation for almost all parameters, as well as a way to measure the impact of a change. This is not a duplication of what’s in the IBM manuals, but additional information that’s needed to properly tune your system. The IEASYSxx parmlib member contains many tuning knobs, as well as several facilities to enable a site to simplify the maintenance of multiple systems. Most of the user IEASYSxx parmlib members that we see are complex and have settings from twenty years ago. It’s definitely worth the time of your staff to start fresh and create a streamlined set of parameters.
Because many of the IEASYSxx parameters relate to the allocation and use of virtual storage, we start the issue with a z/OS 101 article on virtual storage basics, including the 64-bit virtual storage areas that are new with z/OS 1.9 and 1.10. If you’re running DB2, this high virtual storage can greatly improve DB2 performance.
Elsewhere in this Issue
You’ll find many other useful items throughout this newsletter: A description of some new tools available to help monitor your IPL times. • Several freeware utilities that are extremely helpful. • Many New Function APARs, and several APARs about invalid SMF data. • APARs that allow WLM to manage DB2 9 Buffer Pools.
2. SHARE Presentations Online
SHARE was great as usual. See our previous Cheryl’s List #139 for suggestions on some of the more important sessions. You can download them at www.share.org by selecting Proceedings from the left and search on author or session number. They’ll be able to the public for the next five months.
You can find my two presentations, Cheryl’s Hot Flashes #23 (2109) and SHARE Requirements (2353), there as well as on our Web site at http://www.watsonwalker.com/presentations.html. The only difference in the two sets of my presentations is that the one on our Web site has clickable URLs that work.
3. Two Important APARs
I mention these in my Hot Flashes presentation, but I want to make sure that everyone sees them:
- OA32286 (z/OS 1.11, OPENed 11Mar2010) – High LPAR Mgmt and / or High Uncaptured Time at z/OS R11 Only. Norman Hollander of CA mentioned this problem to me the first day of SHARE. If you turn on HiperDispatch on a z/OS 1.11 system, it’s possible to see some heavy SIGP signaling, which results in high LPAR management CPU time and low capture ratios. This appears to occur only on WebSphere systems, but the problem isn’t resolved yet. The local fix is to turn off HiperDispatch.
- IO11698 (SMP/E V3R4-V3R5, OPEN) – New Function. This APAR increases the security for SMP/E and will be rolled out with standard RSU maintenance. Although there is a HOLD action for it, you should note that if you take no action, you may be locked out of SMP/E with no chance to backout the security. This was mentioned in Marna Walle‘s SHARE session 2222 (see pages 50-52).
Stay Tuned!