It’s going to be great to start writing about all the things in this release. I want to briefly review some of the systems management enhancements (and there are a lot of them!). I’ll write more in-depth blogs on these topics and more over the next several months.
I’ve taken some text directly from the announcement letter (in italics) and have added some additional information:
New accounting method and tools for tracking use of temporary storage
IBM i generally does a great job of automatically managing the temporary storage on the system, but if you have an issue with a storage leak, tracking down the problem can be somewhat challenging. The enhancements in 7.2 improve the accounting of temporary storage that will make it easier to determine where the temporary storage is being used. One simple but very useful change is the temporary storage used by a job has been added as a column in the Active Jobs view in Navigator as well as on WRKACTJOB.
I’ll be speaking on this topic at COMMON in the “Manage Work Better with Better Work Management” presentation.
Navigator has some wonderful enhancements in 7.2:
IBM Navigator for i increases the effectiveness of system management activities by adding the ability to manage and compare PTFs between systems, and to monitor, analyze, and predict workload impact on the system. Performance Data Investigator (PDI) allows further monitoring, detection, and adjustment of specific performance issues. Using the collection data as a base, PDI can model future workloads.
- PTF support has been added to Navigator – you can view the PTFs and PTF groups that are installed on your partition; you can install, remove and clean up PTFs from the GUI as well. And as the announcement stated, you can now do the compare and update of PTFs via the Web console.
- A major new function called Batch Model has been added to the performance tasks. Batch model uses Collection Services data collected while the application is running and provides an interface to model a variety of changes and see the effect on that application. For example, you could model how the application’s performance would be affected if the disk configuration were changed.
- System Monitor support has been added to Navigator as well. These System Monitors are very similar to the system monitors that existed in the IBM i System Navigator product as part of Management Central. The System Monitors in Navigator use the Performance Data Investigator to display the monitor graph data. I’ll be talking about this new support in detail at my “Monitoring System Health and Performance of IBM i” at COMMON.
- Finally, Collection Services has many new metrics, as is typical for a new release. The Performance Data Investigator has many new charts of performance metrics. Details will be saved for a future blog. For those of you at COMMON, I’ll be speaking on these topics as well.
The ability to run HTTP server jobs in a custom subsystem. Jobs are no longer tied to QHTTPSVR. This ensures HTTP server jobs have their own dedicated memory pool as needed.
I think this one is pretty self-explanatory – and a very welcome enhancement!
New PTF improvements for tracking of Security Audit Log
The PTF install history is now tracked in the Security Audit Log. This includes tracking changes to system based on PTF activity on the system and will track both PTF operations and/or PTF object changes.
More immediate Apply options for PTFs
IBM has added support for conditional immediate PTFs. Conditional immediate PTFs allow an immediate apply PTF which supersedes a delayed PTF to be immediately applied if the superseded PTF has already been applied to the system.
The release also has many security and networking enhancements – there’s just too much to cover in this one blog.
The upcoming COMMON conference will be a great place to learn more on the 7.2 enhancements. The COMMON sessions from IBMers will have titles and abstracts updated this coming week to reflect sessions with 7.2 content. If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time to do so.
You can find the 7.2 documentation in the IBM Knowledge Center.
I have a lot of new blog articles to write!
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on April 11, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.