Edit: How many people do you run into that do not know AIX details? The market share link no longer works.
Originally posted April 6, 2010 on AIXchange
Recently I was on the phone with a customer who had an issue with the memory utilization on one of his LPARs in his blade server. His application needed more memory. He’s a UNIX guy, but not an AIX guy. His company had purchased an AIX system and had no education budget, so he never learned the nuances of AIX. Happens all the time.
As a result, he didn’t know about dynamic logical partitioning and how it would allow him to easily move memory from one LPAR to another without having to take anything offline.
While talking to him, I logged into his network and reduced the memory being used by one of his test LPARs and moved it to the production LPAR. He was happily surprised that this was resolved so quickly, and that it didn’t require an outage.
Of course, none of this is especially new or interesting to AIX administrators. We already that know we can dynamically allocate resources to the different LPARs on our frames. We know we can mix dedicated and virtual adapters in our client partitions if we need to. We know we can micropartition and fractionalize our CPUs. We know all about processor and memory pools and a built-in logical volume manager that allows us to grow and shrink the size of a filesystem on the fly while it’s mounted and running.
And, because we do this stuff daily, we take it for granted.
But take a moment to consider how you came by this understanding and knowledge. How much of it came from formal classroom education? How much of it came on the job, learning from colleagues?
The world knows UNIX. People run HP-UX and Solaris and different Linux distributions, and they think understand everything that can be done with UNIX. All the while, they jump through hoops replacing disks and patching systems. They don’t know any better. We need to tell them. We need to spread the word.
What makes AIX different? What makes it better? Is it the capability to take a mksysb and clone it to another system? Is it the patch management? Is it the help that IBM support provides?
Admittedly — and proudly — I’m an AIX bigot, and I’m always heartened to see charts like this one that show AIX’s growing market share compared to other UNIX flavors.
Still, I look at the processors IBM sells and the capabilities built into its systems, and I keep thinking that the rest of the world should already know what we know. I have to remind myself that people are busy, and that keeping tabs on the state of AIX and Power servers isn’t everyone’s priority. Then I realize that we, as loyal AIX users, need to make this our priority. We need to show off the unique things people do with AIX systems on a daily basis.
We must spread the word.