Edit: This was when we first knew about AIX 7.
Originally posted April 12, 2010 on AIXchange
Today IBM is making more announcements around AIX and POWER7. I’ll go through a few highlights here, and, I’m sure, cover these topics in greater depth as time goes on. (Note: Some of the information that follows is copied from materials that I received from IBM.)
POWER Blades
There will be three new POWER blades with three new model numbers (the PS700, PS701 and PS702). I’ll get to their capabilities in a moment, but I want to first note that these new model numbers, across the servers and the blades, make it much easier for me to keep things straight in my head. For instance, talking to people about JS blades could be confusing. Is it a JS20? A JS21, JS22 or JS43? Which is POWER5 and which is POWER6? However, with the naming of these new PS blades, it’s easy to recognize them as POWER7 — P stands for POWER, and the 70X numbering indicates POWER7. (By the same token, a 570 server was a nebulous term, since a POWER5 570 and a POWER6 570 aren’t the same thing. Now though, when a 770 is mentioned, we’re obviously talking about POWER7.)
Anyway, some specs: The PS700 blade is a POWER7 4-core (one socket with four cores per blade) with 4GB to 64GB DDR3 memory, 0-2 SAS disks and a single wide blade form factor.
The PS701 is a POWER7 8-core (one socket with eight cores per blade) with 4GB to 128GB DDR3 memory, 0-1 SAS drives and a single wide blade form factor.
The PS702 is a POWER7 16-core (one socket x eight cores per blade) with 4GB to 256GB DDR3 memory, 0-2 SAS disks and a double wide blade form factor. Think of this as two PS701s connected together to provide more cores, more available memory and additional disk drives.
AIX Info
AIX 7 — The next AIX version will be binary compatible with AIX 6 and AIX 5. That’s good news for customers running the older versions of the operating system. (These customers will also be interested in the pending withdrawal of AIX 5.3 support, which I’ll detail in a bit.) AIX 7 will provide vertical scalability of up to 1,024 threads and 256 cores in a single partition. That’ll be a fun day when I have the opportunity to build and run those 256-core LPARs.
AIX Profile Manager — Included with AIX 7, AIX Profile Manager is designed to make it easier to create, update and verify AIX configuration properties across multiple systems. Think of this as a follow-on to the AIX Runtime Expert; it will be an IBM Systems Director plug-in.
AIX Profile Manager is designed to ease the task of managing pools of AIX systems. For instance, imagine you have a pool of 40 WebSphere servers. You tune one and you want to propagate those settings to all of the other servers. AIX Profile Manager will allow you to connect to the “source” via IBM Systems Director. Then you can collect the information into an XML file and apply the profile to the other 39 servers.
Withdrawal of AIX 5.3 support — IBM plans to withdraw marketing for AIX 5.3 in April 2011. For those of you who are still on AIX 5.3, now is the time to start thinking about migrating to a more current version of AIX. This advance notice should give everyone ample time to plan upgrades and migrations.
License metric tool — Also soon to come is an IBM license metric tool that can help AIX users simplify license tracking and audit reporting. The metric tool will allow you to periodically collect information about the software you’re running and make it easier to determine how many licenses you’re using. It runs internally, so the collected information won’t be reported back to IBM. Think of it as a solution for self-auditing your environment. This tool is already available for products like DB2 and WebSphere; now it will support AIX as software to be managed.
Cluster-aware AIX is designed to help you easily create clusters of AIX instances for scale-out computing or high availability. It will include built-in event management and monitoring capabilities, and will also have features such as common device naming to help simplify administration. IBM considers this a foundation for future AIX capabilities and the next generation of PowerHA SystemMirror.
AIX 5.2 WPAR is intended to help minimize the effort needed to consolidate old environments on new, more efficient hardware. For shops that still run legacy hardware and AIX 5.2, this WPAR capability will allow you to stay on AIX V5.2 while moving up to POWER7 and retiring the old hardware. All you’ll need to do is back up an existing AIX 5.2 environment using mksysb and restore it inside of an AIX 7 WPAR.
Personally, I can’t wait to test this. I know of several client environments that stay on older hardware due to application dependencies around 5.2. These folks can really benefit from consolidating old
workloads onto new hardware.
AIX Express Edition — A new Express Edition of AIX will be priced for smaller workloads. AIX 6 and 7 will have all three editions — Express, Standard and Enterprise edition — while AIX 5.3 will only have Standard edition. Express Edition is intended for two deployment situations:
* When you’re running AIX on entry level servers and blades.
* When you’re consolidating smaller workloads on enterprise servers.
This offering is limited to a 4-core maximum partition size with an 8GB memory per core maximum. There will be flexibility to optimize for multiple workloads as any combination of AIX Editions can run on a single server.
Stayed Tuned
As IBM did with AIX6, we can look forward to an open beta for AIX 7 in the next few months. This will give us all a chance to test out the new features and get our environments ready to migrate to the new operating system.