Edit: Have you upgraded yet?
The upgrade to AIX 7 is hassle free and benefit rich
Originally posted September 2010 by IBM Systems Magazine
Last month, IBM announced AIX* 7 and its general availability date of Sept. 10. Companies with current IBM software-maintenance agreements receive this upgrade at no charge, meaning adoption should be swift. Technologists in your company will likely be eager to schedule operating-system upgrades and start using the new features. Because of the open beta, many are already testing it. See “Open Beta” for more details.
[The AIX* 7 open beta program, where you could freely download and test the operating system, has been ongoing this summer, and downloads are scheduled to continue through October. Many of your AIX administrators and IT staff have already downloaded the AIX 7 images and have begun testing the new operating system.
You can install the open beta onto your POWER4* or better hardware, but you can’t take that open beta installation and then upgrade or migrate it. You’ll need to do a fresh reinstallation of AIX 7 after it’s generally available. The open beta is meant for test systems and becoming familiar with the operating system and its new features, not for production workloads. Assume that everything you do on this test machine will need to be redone after installing from the official release media.
—R.M.]
Why 7?
Take some care when calling AIX 7 a new version of the operating system; it’s really more of an evolution or continuation of AIX 6. The upgrade from AIX 5.3 to AIX 6 was considerably more extensive than the change from AIX 6 to AIX 7, which might be considered a fine-tuning. For instance, the operating-system default parameters make more sense when we do a fresh install of AIX 6 compared with the tuning and tweaking needed with a fresh installation of AIX 5.3, and AIX 7 will continue with the default settings making sense for the majority of customers.
Some people wanted to call this new release AIX 6.2, but IBM went with AIX 7 in part because of the POWER7* hardware releases. Don’t let the name make you worry about switching in your environment. According to IBM Marketing Manager Jay Kruemcke, “If you’ve been waiting to upgrade, now’s a good time to do so.” Kruemcke points to the binary-compatibility guarantee—where IBM states: “Your applications, whether written in house or supplied by an application provider, will run on AIX 7 if they currently run on AIX 6 or AIX 5L—without recompilations or modification”—and IBM’s great history of binary compatibility throughout the years.
Most IT staff will make time in their busy schedules to test new versions of operating systems as soon as they can. With open beta, they may have already reported the results of their testing and be making the case for moving to AIX 7 now. The case is strong.
If you’ve been waiting to upgrade, now’s a good time to do so. —Jay Kruemcke, IBM marketing manager
The Power of POWER
As you consider AIX 7, it’s important to know what version of POWER* systems (or older RS/6000* systems) and the operating system your company is running. Many of you may be surprised to discover that you’re running AIX 5.2 on older hardware. This version of the AIX operating system was withdrawn from marketing in July 2008, but, for whatever reason, some companies still need it running in their environments. This old machine is typically hosting an application that can’t be upgraded—or may not be worth the effort to upgrade—and it’s typically running on older, slower, less energy-efficient, nonvirtualized hardware. “When that’s the case, you’re missing out on great performance enhancements, new features and cost savings,” Kruemcke says.
Although AIX 7 can run on POWER4* or later hardware, consider running it on POWER7 hardware. A huge benefit of AIX 7 running on POWER7 hardware is the capability to collect those older AIX 5.2 operating-system images, take a system backup (mksysb), and install that AIX 5.2 backup image without modification into an AIX 7 workload partition (WPAR). Once your mksysb image has been created and moved to your POWER7 system, you can give a flag to the WPAR creation command (mkwpar) and restore that backup image into a WPAR running inside AIX 7. Since these AIX 5.2 WPARs will run on top of AIX 7, you’ll also benefit from POWER7’s simultaneous multithreading with four threads and greater performance. This is an excellent way to consolidate old workloads running on less-efficient hardware.
You should immediately see improved performance after moving your workload to a POWER7 server from older hardware, and you’ll enjoy all of the benefits of virtualization on new hardware. “Customers who’ve never looked at WPARs before will take a second look,” Kruemcke says.
Moving your AIX 5.2 system to POWER7 hardware makes it part of an LPAR. It can be part of a micropartitioned pool of processors and donate any idle cycles back into the shared processor pool, and it can have its disk and networking virtualized and handled through VIO servers. The whole LPAR can move to another POWER7 machine in your environment using Live Partition Mobility, or just the WPAR itself can move to another POWER7 machine via Live Application Mobility. Your older operating system can now benefit from all of the advantages of the latest technology, without upgrading the operating system and application.
If you choose to run AIX 5.2 in a WPAR, you’ll have access to IBM phone support, and the operating system will have patches available for critical issues. Instead of needing extended IBM support contracts for your AIX 5.2 machines, you can get ongoing support through your regular maintenance contracts.
Why WPARs?
Nigel Griffiths, Power Systems* technical support, IBM Europe, says companies will see a quadruple win with this move: They’ll remove end-of-life slower machines from their environments, do away with the higher electricity costs of those older machines, eliminate the higher hardware-maintenance costs for those older machines, and decrease the data-center footprint of machine and network cabling.
“WPARs have some great advantages over LPARs,” Griffiths says. “WPARs can be created faster than LPARs, LPARs need more memory to boot compared to WPARs, and you can share application code between multiple WPARs compared to having the same application sitting across LPARs, to name a few.”
Although the WPAR adoption rate has been slow so far, Kruemcke says new WPAR capabilities will cause more people to consider them. Besides running AIX 5.2 in a WPAR, you’ll also have support for NPIV and VIOS storage with WPARs in AIX 7, as the operating system includes support for exporting a virtual or physical Fibre channel adapter to a WPAR. In the new release, the adapter will be exported to the WPAR in the same manner as storage devices.
If you’re running AIX 5.3 on POWER7 hardware, keep in mind that you’re running in POWER6* compatibility mode and aren’t fully exploiting the new hardware. “Since you can upgrade directly from AIX 5.3 to AIX 7, it makes sense to do that upgrade and enjoy the performance benefits of running AIX 7 in POWER7 mode on POWER7 hardware,” Kruemcke says.
What’s New?
Although not a major change, AIX 7 boasts some nice new features.
1,024 threads. AIX 7 supports a large LPAR running 1,024 threads, compared with 256 threads in AIX 6. This large LPAR contains 256 cores, and each core can run four threads, providing the capability to run 1,024 threads in a single operating-system image. If your business needs a very large machine running a massively scaled workload, this thread boost will be a huge benefit. Even if you don’t think you need the capability, it’s nice to know you can migrate your workload into this large environment if needed.
AIX Profile Manager. Besides the massive scalability and the capability to run AIX 5.2 in a WPAR, AIX 7 also supports the AIX Profile Manager, formerly known as the AIX Runtime Expert. An IBM system director plugin, AIX Profile Manager provides configuration management across a group of systems. This lets you see your current system values, apply new values across multiple systems and compare values between systems. Configuring and maintaining your machines can be easier, and you can verify that machine settings haven’t changed over time. You can also set up one machine, then copy its properties across multiple systems. These profiles and properties might include environment variables, tuneables and security profiles.
Systems Director. AIX 7 has also made a change in Web-based System Manager (WebSM), which now integrates with IBM Systems Director and is called the IBM Systems Director Console for AIX. This provides a Web-based management console for AIX so systems administrators have centralized access to do tasks like viewing, monitoring and managing systems. This tool will let staff manage systems using distributed command execution and use familiar interfaces such as the System Management Interface Tool from a central management control point.
Language support. As more companies around the globe deploy AIX 7, they’ll be happy to know that it supports 61 languages and more than 250 locales based on the latest Unicode technology. Unicode 5.2 provides standardized character positions for 107,156 glyphs, and AIX 7 complies with the latest version. This will make the operating system and applications more accessible for non-English speakers.
Updated shell environment. AIX 7 now provides a newly updated version of the ksh93 environment. AIX 6 provided a ksh93 based upon the ksh93e version of the popular shell. AIX 7 now updates ksh93 to be based upon ksh93t. Users now have access to a variety of enhancements and improvements that the Korn shell community has made over the past several years, resulting in a more robust shell programming experience. Many customers complain about needing to learn to get around in the Korn shell, and AIX 7 should help them see improvements when they run the set –o viraw command. They’ll then have access to tab completion and moving through their shell history file using the arrow keys instead of vi commands. Users of other shells from other operating systems will have one less thing to learn on AIX.
Role-based access control. Many companies still rely on sudo to give nonroot users root user functionality. AIX 7 continues supporting role-based access control (RBAC) but enhances it by providing resource isolation. In previous iterations of RBAC, if you gave someone access to change a device, they could change any device of that type. Now you can limit their access to a specific device on the system. This lets you give a nonroot user access to resources that they can manage, and have more granular control over what they can do.
Clustering. Another highlight of this announcement is the clustering technology that’s being built into the operating system. AIX 7 now has built-in kernel-based heartbeats and messages, and multichannel communication between nodes. It also features clusterwide notification of errors and common naming of devices across nodes. This will let multiple machines see the same disk and have it be called the same name. Built-in security and storage commands support operations across the cluster.
You used to have to purchase HACMP or PowerHA* products and install them on top of AIX to get these features, but now much of that functionality is built into the operating system and better integrated with AIX 7. This should make implementing high-availability clusters easier for administrators.
Continued Investment
IBM continues to make investments in the Power Systems hardware, AIX and software. You can be sure that IBM will continue to stand behind the investments you’re making well into the future. So take AIX 7 for a spin and enjoy the new features.