Readers of Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter will be familiar with Alain Maneville, from IBM France. Alain co-wrote an article about HiperDispatch for the Tuning Letter, and is also the author of the LPAR Design tool. The LPAR Design tool allows you to enter your LPAR configuration and model the impact that changes in an LPAR’s weight or its number of engines will have on the CPC HiperDispatch topology. We highly recommend the use of this tool if you want to optimize your HiperDispatch topology.
Alain just released an updated version (8.2) of his tool. It is available for download from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/wlm/WLM_Further_Info_Tools.html#Design. The most recent update adds support for zPCR (9.0), and generates an exception if the number of Vertical Low engines exceeds the IBM recommendation as described in Kathy Walsh’s Techdoc TD106388 (Number of Logical CPs Defined for an LPAR).
If you use Alain’s tool, we recommend that you always download the latest version before running it.