Edit: Some links no longer work.
Originally posted December 23, 2014 on AIXchange
Recently on his Twitter feed, IBMer Jay Kruemcke noted that Chef Client is now available on AIX. I’ll write about this in detail in the near future, but for now, here’s the word from Chef’s website:
“Today I’m very pleased to announce the availability of Chef Client 12.0 for IBM AIX 6.1 and 7.1. It is freely available from our downloads page and can be used with any version of the Chef Server up to and including Chef Server 12.
This is the first major new platform for Chef in some time, and it’s certainly been a long time in coming. We’ve heard from some of our large enterprise customers that they have significant investment in IBM’s AIX platform and expect to continue that into the future, so they would like to manage those systems using the same flexible automation tool, Chef, with which they are already familiar.”
I’ve long recommended Twitter as a resource for finding news and information about AIX and related topics. I should point out that you don’t need to have your own Twitter feed to benefit from it. For example, you can find my own feed simply by searching on “Rob McNelly twitter.” (For the record, here’s the direct link.) Twitter’s advanced search function is another, more direct way to dive in. Check out the results for a search on “IBM Power Systems.”
As a regular user of Twitter, I follow a number of AIX experts, including Kruemcke. Other recent tweets of Jay’s have led me to a document that summarizes update benefits for AIX releases and related offerings, as well as videos on using nmon interactively and capturing data to nmon files so they can be analyzed later.
Jay also tweeted about this white paper covering HMC simplification:
“Managing the IBM PowerVM infrastructure involves configuring its different components, such as the POWER HypervisorTM and the Virtual I/O Server(s). Historically, this has required the use of multiple management tools and interfaces, such as the Hardware Management Console (HMC) and the Virtual I/O Server command line interface.
The PowerVM simplification enhancements were designed to significantly simplify the management of the PowerVM infrastructure, improve the Power SystemsTM management user experience, and reduce the learning ramp for users unfamiliar with the PowerVM technologies.
This paper provides an overview of the PowerVM simplification enhancements and illustrates how to use the new features available in the HMC to set up and manage the PowerVM infrastructure.”
While I’m at it, here are some other nuggets I’ve found on Twitter lately. Via IBM’s Nigel Griffiths, learn how to use nmon analyser in this Steve Atkins video. And from IBM’s Chris Gibson, here’s information about an STG lab services offering and the LPM automation tool. And thanks to Christophe Rousseau and cmod666.org, I even came across this humorous visual about live migrations.
Do you use Twitter to locate AIX resources? Who do you follow?
This blog will be updated on January 6, 2015. Happy New Year!