The AIX 6 open beta

IBM wishes to thank the thousands of open beta participants for making the first AIX® open beta a resounding success. Not only did you get the opportunity to download and run AIX 6 months before general availability, but we listened to your feedback via the forum and incorporated many changes and fixes into the final product as a result.

Your participation in the open beta and your feedback helped IBM continue to enhance the position of AIX as the world's leading UNIX® operating system.

Although the open beta is no longer available for download, we will leave the forum available for you to view for another six months. We also invite all of you to use the existing AIX technical forum.

More information on the open beta forum

Openness, such as compliance with open standards, has always been an integral part of the AIX operating system (OS). The next release of AIX, Version 6.1, extends this openness to the product release process with the first ever AIX open beta. The open beta allowed a broad set of IBM clients to download and gain experience with AIX 6 before it becomes generally available.

An "open" beta for the next AIX release differs from the traditional beta in three key areas:

• Almost anyone who was interested was able to download and install a pre–release version of AIX 6. By contrast, only a few clients would have the opportunity to test a new AIX release in a traditional beta.
• Participants in the open beta did not receive traditional support from IBM. Instead, you accessed a Web forum to discuss questions and issues.
• The only legal document required for participation in the open beta was a "click to accept" license agreement that clearly stated all program conditions.

Most functions planned for release with AIX 6 were available for testing in the open beta. Not all features were available at the start of the open beta and some features may not be included in the generally available release of AIX 6.

Key function area supported as part of the open beta.

Key functional areas included in the open beta were:

• Workload Partitions
  A new, software based, virtualization approach that complements the existing IBM System Logical Partitions by reducing the number of operating system images that have to be managed when consolidating workloads.
• Role Based Access Control
  Provides improved security and manageability by allowing administrators to grant authorization for management of specific AIX resources to users other than root by associating those resources with a role that is then associated with a particular system user.
• AIX Security Expert enhancements
  The AIX Security Expert has been enhanced to provide an option to store security templates directly in a Lightweight Directory Protocol (LDAP) directory—simplifying implementation of a consistent security across an entire enterprise.
• Name Resolver Caching Daemon
  The Name Resolver Caching Daemon is a new facility to cache host lookup information locally which can improve the performance of applications that access this type of information multiple times.
• probevue dynamic tracing
  probevue is a new dynamic tracing tool that can simplify debugging complex system or application code. This tool allows a developer or system administrator to dynamically insert trace breakpoints in existing code without having to recompile the code.
• System Director Console for AIX
  This new facility provides direct access to the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) in a Web browser. The System Director Console for AIX is included with AIX 6 and does not require any other Web server or other software.

The open beta used an abbreviated installation process based on the mksysb facility. This allowed you to quickly install and start running AIX 6. This standardized installation process also simplified problem determination and self help through the Web discussion forum.

You were able to download the open beta code as multiple ISO CD–ROM images. You were expected to use readily available CD burning programs to burn the ISO images to blank media. Once created, you were able to boot from the CD–ROM to perform the simplified installation process. IBM did not provide physical media to beta participants—the only distribution channel was by download from the open beta Web page.

The open beta provided early access to AIX 6 before it would be ready for general release. Because of this, some of the new AIX 6 features were not fully functional or were not available at the start of the open beta.

In addition, there were some areas of AIX 6 functionality that were not available as part of the open beta:

• Encryption dependent features
  Some features, which are dependent on specific encryption technology, were not functional in the open beta due to restrictions on the export of encryption technology. These features include the Encrypting Filesystem, Trusted Execution, and NFS encryption support.
• Installation features
  Since the open beta used a simplified installation process, test of new installation features such as Secure by Default, Trusted AIX, and Graphical Installation was not supported in the open beta. The simplified installation process did the equivalent of a complete overwrite installation; no migration or preservation installations was possible—all data on the installation disks was overwritten.

You were able to install the beta code onto a standalone system or a Logical Partition. Specific disk and memory requirements will be published in the release notes documentation.

At the conclusion of the beta, you must perform a complete overwrite installation to install a generally available version of AIX 6. It is not be possible to do a migration or preservation installation to move from the beta level code to a generally available version of AIX 6.

Translation
The AIX 6 message text and documentation, that was provided as part of this open beta, was available in English only. Translation of AIX 6 message text and documentation is only done as a final step before the general availability of AIX 6.

Support
IBM will not provide traditional support such as IBM SupportLine for the open beta. Use the Web forum to post question and issues related to the beta.