|
This article concludes a series of four articles as an introductino to working with WPAR - Workload Partitions.
This installment focuses on the Task Activity Monitor. I consider this one of the best features of the WPAR Manager interface - especially for tracking down (error) messages long after a task has
finished.
In the previous article the focus was on manipulating system WPAR's - creating, starting, relocating (Live Application Mobility), pausing and stopping a system WPAR. The final status of the
WPAR (stopped) is best pictured as:
Using the Task Activity Panel
Clearly the WPAR has stopped. At the
WPAR manager I had not worried about much more than what I saw when I
gave the command to stop and closed the browser. However, the next day I had a surprise. The WPAR manager will not let me start the WPAR again!?
The WPAR manager considers the WPAR in a transitional state and wont let me start
it - only stop it! What is going on here!?
Time to review the activity from the day before. To investigate I go back to the Task
Activity screen and look at past activities - and the screen is
blank as the request no longer fits in the default query of the last
24 hours. I increase the time I want to look to 48 hours, and get
the following list.
Note the different tabs: one for
Managed Systems, one for Workload Partitions, and one for the current
focus: Task Activity. (and also that I have collapsed the left menu).
As I want to know want the system has
to say about the failed activity I click on the entry and get:
There is still more to be known, click
thru again to see:
And the error tab "explains" what
went wrong. For some reason the pid could not be killed and gave an
unexpected result. As the WPAR is really stopped we need to stop it
"again" in such a way that WPAR manager will return the WPAR to a
state that permits it to be started again.
Back at Workload Partitions tab: the
WPAR is transitional - not Defined....
We choose the Action Stop and get the
next detail screen and choose th Forced Stop option, and press OK.
The result is a "happy end" - the
WPAR is in a normal, defined state and I can choose "start" if I
want.
Summary
This concludes the WPAR Manager Introduction articles.
You should have a good impression of how WPAR Manager and WPAR Agents LPP
can be used to manage AIX Workload Partitions, or WPAR's.
Note that there is also a command line
interface - and I shall cover it in more detail another time (check out the this area for articles from the beta test period for a quick review of the command line interface). The CLI (command line interface) is an excellent interface for working on WPAR's on a single system. But the CLI alone is not sufficient for Live Application Mobility.
Further, I like the WPAR manager especially for the
extra information I can easily find using the Task Activity panels
for tracing and viewing both ongoing and past actions.
|
