COMMON POWERUp 2025

Every few months the IBM i development team delivers new updates and features across the operating system. Keeping track and actually using these changes can be a difficult task at best.  This session is the favorite new enhancements from a team of IBM i developers. You get to hear each of our favorite updates to the OS that have been delivered over the past bit. This session is new every time, often lots of fun and for sure there is something for everyone.  

The IBM i restricted state (DSP01) Console environment is an oft neglected part of System Administration/Management.  Many things allow systems to run months or even years with out needing to connect this system Console.  Then, when it is absolutely necessary to have this level of access for a system upgrade, hardware replacement, etc and the environment isn't correctly configured or is completely unknown significant delays are likely increasing a system outage.

In this session we will go over the configuration and usage best practices for both the HMC and LAN Console environments.

Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Are you really prepared? The difference in surviving depends on how well you prepare for the unexpected.  This session breaks down the components of disaster recovery planning as it relates to the availability and recovery of your systems in Cloud and On-premise . Testing your plan is essential examining critical points of failure, assumptions, and technical gaps.

Business-critical applications must be up and running reliably without failure. When something unexpected occurs, you must identify the cause and correct it quickly. The relentless push to do more with less is only going to intensify while the tolerance for failure keeps dropping. Yet identifying points of failure can be tricky as complexities scale. 

The IBM Administration Runtime Expert for i (ARE) can be used to define attributes of a healthy environment and use those defined attributes to validate that the environment is as expected.

This session will everything you need to know to get started with ARE: 
- Overview of what ARE is and example use cases
- Creating and editing templates
- Setting up system groups, verification options, and verifying systems
- Understanding the reports

Abstract: In this presentation Steve shares some quick and simple tricks and tips to check your server is healthy and working at its optimum level. This presentation gives you a practical list of tasks that you will be able to use with all your IBM i Servers to keep them running at their best.  We will cover a wide range of topics, some technical, some practical, all of which are free of charge.

 In days gone by the IBM supplied program QSTRUP combined with a couple options on CHGIPLA was good enough for most IBM i shops. It started what seemed to be needed and anything else we stumbled through after each IPL. When it was time to shut down a PWRDWNSYS or ENDSBS command took down whatever was running. We were happy.  
 
Today though we often see dozens of subsytems running many web servers, other needed batch jobs and services. We see monitors and queue processing jobs and many writers. For security purposes we should be starting only the TCP servers that we need, not all of them. Likely we should not start IPV6 and start things in sequence as well.  
 
Further considerations may be needed in an HA environment. These include not starting jobs until iASPS are available and starting different IP interfaces and services depending on production or backup mode of the server. We may want to handle special startup modes while doing PTFs, backups or other system maintenance.  
 
In this session we will work with customizing that startup. We'll discuss staring PASE jobs with QSH, web server jobs and more. Finally we will also work with sequencing the shutdown of the system. As part of this we'll discuss some simple ways to know what needs to be shut down and smoothly handling that.

Ai, its all the buzz, but what if you really could start to leverage AI in the automated management of your IBM i systems ? With the latest support from IBM and the Instana product, combined with tools like Prometheus and Ansible, you now have options for monitoring virtual any metric you can dream up, combined with powerful alerting capabilities and AI to help determine the best corrective action via Ansible. In this session we will review these technologies, as well as show demos of this in action.