Hello and welcome to this module. Now that you've seen things like basic administrative tasks, things like the concepts of virtual machines, images and how to manage them. Let's turn to some more administrative tasks that can be performed depending on your needs. This module will serve as a guide to some of the lesser known admin tasks. And also talk about the kind of updates and features that you can expect from the developers of IBM cloud power VC manager. In this module we will cover lessons on active memory expansion, simplified remote restart, dynamic resource optimizer, improved volume lifecycle. Database to Maria DB, projects, users and groups, and a few other new features of the product. Now let's talk about active memory expansion first. All right, so what is active memory expansion, active memory expansion, or to its friends, AME. Allows the effective maximum memory capacity of AIX virtual machines to be up to 100% larger than the true physical memory maximum. You might think that's a great feature, but there is a catch though, it only works on the IBM AIX operating system. Active memory expansion relies on compression of in memory data, to increase the amount of data that can be placed into memory. So it can expand the effective memory capacity of a power system. The in memory data compression is managed by the system automatically. What's great about this, is that the compression is transparent to any applications running on the operating system and the users. This feature is also available in the standard version of IBM power VC. Okay, now, let's take a quick look at how to enable this feature. As usual, let's start off by going to the Configuration View, and as we've seen before, go into the Compute Template setting. Now we can either create a new template or edit an existing one. In this case, let's edit the existing one, named small, here we select the advanced option. We've already talked about the advanced option in a previous lesson. With this form, you can set the minimum desired and maximum processor and memory settings separately. Beneath the memory settings there's a small box called Power VM only. Inside it is the checkbox to enable AME and an input field to specify the AME expansion factor. So what's the expansion factor? Well, the increase in available memory is called the expansion factor. The expansion factor should be between 1 and 10, so an example of an expansion factor of 1.5, indicates a 50% memory expansion. Specify two if you want to double the memory. Active memory expansion is configurable on a PAR logical partition or L PAR basis. It can be selectively enabled for one or more L PARs on a system. When active memory expansion is enabled on an L PAR, the operating system will compress a portion of the LPAR's memory, and leave the remaining portion of memory uncompressed. This results in memory effectively been broken up into two pools, a compressed pool and an uncompressed pool. The operating system will dynamically vary the amount of memory that is compressed based on the workload and the configuration of the L PAR. There is also a minor drawback to this process as active memory expansion relies on memory compression. Some additional CPU utilization will be consumed when active memory expansion is in use. The amount of additional CPU utilization needed for active memory expansion, will vary based on the workload and the level of memory expansion being used. This is how you, as an administrator, can enable AME. Now let's talk about automated remote restart, as the name seems to indicate, this let's you restart virtual machines automatically. But what is it, and why is it useful? Well, let's explore, automated remote restart monitors, hosts for failure by using the PRS or platform resource scheduler, high availability service. If a host fails power VC, automatically remote restarts the virtual machines from the failed host to another host within a host group. Without automated remote restart enabled, when a host goes into an error or a downstate, you must manually trigger the remote restart operation. But you can manually remote restart virtual machines from a host at anytime, regardless of its automated remote restart setting. This feature can be enabled or disabled for each host group, host on virtual machine. By default, the automated remote restart is disabled on host groups, and is enabled on hosts and virtual machines. However, no automated remote restart occurs, unless the automated remote restart is enabled on the host group. You can disable automated remote restart on individual hosts or virtual machines at anytime, so that's the theory. Now let's see how to enable it, again, we rely on the advanced options of the Compute Template. There's a setting in it, as you can see here to enable virtual machine remote restart. This marks a virtual machine as being remote restart capable, and will restart it in case the host on which it's running fails. Now remember the automated remote restart will not occur unless it's enabled on the host group. To do that, go to your host group under the hosts tab, there you will see the option to enable automated remote restart for the host group. If one host in this group fails, then the virtual machines which are remote restart capable, will automatically be rebuilt and powered on, on another host with no intervention needed on your part. We've plenty more features to discuss starting in the next video with dynamic resource optimization. [MUSIC]
