The Cache battery plays a significant role to provide power to the hard disk. When one of these batteries dies, it affects the array of disk that it controls and will have a significant impact on the hard disk performance. The Cache battery or lithium ion batteries can be hot swapped, means they can be changed when the system is up and running. However, sometimes depending on the machine type it would require to bring down the system to change the battery.
The battery sends warning messages to QSYSOPR message queue before 90 days of its expiry.
CPPEA13 - *Attention* Contact your hardware service provider
CPP8988 - A critical system hardware problem has occurred. Critical Message Handler has been run.
Once, you confirm that this is a battery that is about to expire from work with problem (WRKPRB) or via STRSST or by QSMBTTCC program.
Through QSMBTTCC program:-
CALL PGM(QSYS/QSMBTTCC)
The battery sends warning messages to QSYSOPR message queue before 90 days of its expiry.
CPPEA13 - *Attention* Contact your hardware service provider
CPP8988 - A critical system hardware problem has occurred. Critical Message Handler has been run.
Once, you confirm that this is a battery that is about to expire from work with problem (WRKPRB) or via STRSST or by QSMBTTCC program.
Through QSMBTTCC program:-
CALL PGM(QSYS/QSMBTTCC)
As you can see here the Estimated time to warning and Estimated time to error , you can determine how many days are left to change the battery. Then you have to call up IBM and inform them your battery resource name , serial number that needs to change. IBM will deliver the new battery and will the CE(customer engineer) will replace this. In order to avoid any critical situation , it is wise to record the battery information once a week or month for all the system that you manage.
You can also pull the same information by using STRSST profile.
STRSST :-
After you sign in to SST, you can check the status of all cache batteries on your machine by selecting option 1 (Start a Service Tool) followed by option 7 (Hardware Service Manager), and option 9 (Work with resources containing cache battery packs). The Work with resources containing battery packs screen displays all the resources that contain a battery pack. If you take an option 5 (Display battery information) for any of the battery packs, you will see a screen that looks something like this.
Battery Information
Resource name . . . . . . . . . . . : DC01
Serial number . . . . . . . . . . . : xx-xxxxxxx
Type-model . . . . . . . . . . . . : 2757-001
Frame ID . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 1
Card position . . . . . . . . . . . : C01
Battery type . . . . . . . . . . . : Lithium Ion (LiIon)
Battery state . . . . . . . . . . . : Warning condition
Power-on time (days) . . . . . . . : 806
Adjusted power-on time (days) . . . : 945
Estimated time to warning (days) . : 182
Estimated time to error (days) . . : 273
Note :- Both the message warning value and the time to error value are marked as estimates. This means that these numbers are not exact predictive values; battery failure could be much closer than you think and you should get IBM in as soon as possible to help survey the situation and schedule a cache battery pack change.
Highly energetic blog, I enjoyed that bit. Will there be a part 2?
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thanks sharmistha but why have you stopped writing the blog. It was the best blog on the internet for Iseries information.
ReplyDeletePlease continue to write this blog.
thanks
vikas
Very Nice articles and useful tips Sharmistha.
ReplyDeleteThanks Vikas... I am keeping busy and the security system in my current organization renders little scope for me to use their resources for blogging!! Hope soon will figure out something to overcome this challenge :)
ReplyDeleteWe recently had the batteries replaced on two of our IOA controllers (574E-001). For the next week and a half our system performance was seriously degraded. We took option 3 to 'Start IOA cache' on each resource from the 'Work with Resources Containing Cache Battery Packs'. The resulting message stated that the request could not be completed because there was no error state. However, the performance degradation went away. Not intuitive, but it works:
ReplyDelete-Log into system as QSECOFR
-Do a STRSST
-Do option 1 "Start a service tool"
-Do option 7 "Hardware service manager"
-Do option 9 "Work with resource containing cache battery packs"
-Do option 3 "Start IOA cache" on each resource for which batteries were replaced.
-Ignore the resulting message that says the request could not be completed since no error condition is signaled.
-- Stephen West