Performance

IBM HMC client performance

The HMC java client’s performance is painful, especially if there is much latency on your connection. It also requires Windows. IBM had published a workaround for the performance issue using VNC (which should also work for other non-windows OS’s)

Link

Which is OK, but if you have X11 available I prefer this:
Connect to an lpar
run
wsm -host HMC_NAME

This will open an X11 based HMC client window.

You can also just run
wsm
and add hosts from the client

Sun's UltraSPARC T1/2 servers are amazing

I completed an upgrade of our production web and app servers a couple of months ago. For webservers we moved from using Sun E250’s to T1000’s and for the application servers (Weblogic) we moved from V880s to T5220. The change in system load has far exceeded expectations!

Webservers

E250
T1000
CPU's
2x400MHz
6x1000MHz
Peak CPU
100%
2.4%
Peak Load Average
2.7
0.58

Application Servers

V880
T5220
CPU's
8x900MHz
8x1200MHz
Peak CPU
89%
7.9%
Peak Load Average
11.4
4.9

As an added bonus, the T5220’s, with 3 years maintenance, cost us less than a single years maintenance on theV880’s, and we freed up a lot of rack space.