Minor Good News On Coupling Facility Performance Reporting

(Originally posted 2008-09-19.)

In recent releases RMF have put the machine serial number into both SMF Type 74 Subtype 4 (Coupling Facility Activity) and SMF Type 70 Subtype 1 (CPU Activity). Actually we get two fields in each case: Plant Number and Sequence Number, which you can put together as eg “51-12345”.

Soon we’ll get another piece of the jigsaw: Partition Number in 74-4.

This is a small change but a nice useful one…

It finally enables you to correlate the CPU Activity Report view of a Coupling Facility LPAR and the Coupling Facility Activity Report view. I have seen several customer cases where this has been impossible from SMF alone, even from counting engines in both records.

I intend to say a little more about it in my “Much Ado About CPU – Now with z10 Too” presentation at Expo in October. In fact I’d better get writing the new foils… given that I think it needs restructuring to compress much of the “everybody knows this already” material. (I expect to put quite a bit about z10 in, as well as some more stuff about Coupling Facility CPU such as the Structure-Level CPU field R744SETM.)