AIX 7

Highlights

• Latest generation of IBM’s market leading, scalable, open standards-based UNIX operating system
• Binary compatibility with previous releases of AIX to preserve client’s software investment
• Tremendous vertical scalability to provide capacity for your IT infrastructure to grow with your business
• Built-in clustering capabilities to simplify high availability (HA) and to provide infrastructure for future innovation
• Enhancements to virtualisation capabilities to provide even more flexibility to support changing workloads
• Built on IBM POWER technology and virtualisation to help deliver superior performance, increase system utilisation and efficiency, provide for easy administration and reduce total costs
• Available in three editions for even more capability and flexibility.

AIX, the future of the UNIX operating system

Businesses today need to maximise the return on investment (ROI) in information technology. Their IT infrastructure should have the flexibility to quickly adjust to changing business computing requirements and scale to handle ever expanding workloads – without adding complexity. But just providing flexibility and performance isn’t enough; the IT infrastructure also needs to provide rock-solid security and near-continuous availability and while managing energy and cooling costs.

These are just some of the reasons why more and more businesses are choosing the AIX operating system running on IBM systems designed with Power Architecture technology. With its proven scalability, advanced virtualisation, security, manageability and reliability features, the AIX operating system is an excellent choice for building an IT infrastructure. And, AIX is the only operating system that leverages decades of IBM technology innovation designed to provide the highest level of performance and reliability of any UNIX operating system.

The newest version of AIX, Version 7, known as ‘AIX 7,’ is binary compatible with previous versions of the AIX operating system, including AIX 6, AIX 5L and even earlier versions of AIX. This means that applications that ran on earlier versions will continue to run on AIX 7 – guaranteed.¹ AIX 7 is an open-standards-based UNIX operating system that is designed to comply with the Open Group’s Single UNIX Specification Version 4

AIX 7 runs on systems based on POWER4, PPC970, POWER5, POWER6 and the latest generation of POWER processor, POWER7. Most of the new features of AIX 7 are available on the earlier POWER processor-based platforms, but the most capability is delivered on systems built with the POWER6 and POWER7 processors. The AIX operating system is designed for the IBM Power, System p, System i, System p5, System i5, eServer p5, eServer pSeries and eServer i5 server product lines, as well as IBM BladeCenter blades based on Power Architecture technology.

AIX 7 extends the capabilities of the AIX operating system to expand the vertical scalability of AIX to partitions with 256 processor cores and 1024 threads to handle the largest workloads. To support higher performance for large workloads, AIX 7 will also includes new Terabyte (TB) segment support which leverages memory management capabilities of POWER7 processors designed to improve memory performance. This TB segment capability is also included in AIX 6 at Technology Level 6 but is not automatically enabled on AIX 6.

AIX 7 also includes new virtualisation capabilities designed to simplify the consolidation of older, AIX V5.2 environments. This new capability, which requires the purchase of the ‘AIX 5.2 Workload Partitions (WPARs) for AIX 7’ product, is designed to allow administrators to simply back up an existing logical parition (LPAR) running AIX 5.2 and restore it into an AIX 7 WPAR.

AIX 7 also includes a new built-in clustering capability called Cluster Aware AIX. This new technology builds clustering technologies in the AIX base operating system. This built-in clustering support provides commands and programming APIs to create a cluster from a group of AIX instances and provides kernel-based heartbeat, monitoring and event infrastructure. This new infrastructure supports common device naming for storage devices across the cluster. While this new Cluster Aware AIX functionality is primarily intended to provide a reliable, scalable clustering infrastructure for products such as PowerHA SystemMirror and PowerVM, clients can directly use the Cluster Aware AIX functionality to facilitate management of scale-out computing environments.

AIX 7 also includes new security features to improve and simplify security administration. For example, the new Domain Support in Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is an enhancement to RBAC that allows a security policy to restrict administrative access to a specific set of similar resources, such as a subset of the available network adapters. This allows IT organisations that host services for multiple tenants to restrict administrator access to only the resources associated with a particular tenant. Domains can be used to control access to Volume Groups, Filesytems, files and devices.

Finally, AIX 7 includes new manageability enhancements such as the AIX Profile Manager. The AIX Profile Manager can manage the configuration of AIX via eXtensible Markup Language (XML) profiles. This capability builds on the Runtime Expert capability introduced in AIX 6 Technology Level 4. This new management capability features an IBM Systems Director interface.

This AIX release underscores IBM’s firm commitment to long-term UNIX innovations that deliver business value. This release of AIX continues the evolution of the UNIX operating system that started in Austin, Texas, with AIX on the RT PC and the RISC Systems/6000 (RS/6000) over 20 years ago.

¹ Additional information on the binary compatability of AIX (US)

* Supported only on Power Systems servers with POWER6 or POWER7 processor technology

** Also supported by AIX 5.3

AIX 7 is available in three different editions: An AIX Express Edition that includes most of the functionality of AIX 7 Standard Edition but has some restrictions on vertical scalability and does not include the AIX Profile Manager and Cluster Aware AIX capabilities. An AIX Standard Edition that includes AIX with no vertical scalability limits and an AIX Enterprise Edition that includes AIX 7, the WPARs Manager for AIX and the IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition including several Tivoli products. The base AIX installation media is the same for all three editions: The client specifies the edition to be installed during the installation process. A new command, ‘chedition’ can be used to identify which edition is in use, or can be used to change the edition dynamically without rebooting.

• AIX 7 Standard Edition: The AIX 7 Standard Edition is the edition that many people would think of as ‘AIX.’ The vertical scalability of AIX Standard edition is only limited by the current maximum capabilities of the Power Systems platform of up to 256 cores and 1028 threads in a single partition. AIX 7 Standard Edition is relevant for most customer workloads
• AIX 7 Enterprise Edition: The AIX 7 Enterprise Edition includes all the UNIX capabilities of AIX Standard Edition, but also has a significant amount of additional management capabilities. AIX Enterprise Edition includes AIX 7, the WPARs Manager and the IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition. AIX Enterprise Edition includes all of these products under a single ordering and support structure at an attractive price compared to purchasing the individual products separately. AIX Enterprise Edition is intended for clients with large-scale computing environments that would benefit from the additional monitoring, automation, energy, virtualisation and network manageability capabilities delivered with AIX Enterprise Edition
• AIX 7 Express Edition: The AIX 7 Express Edition provides the almost the same functional capabilities of AIX Standard, at a lower price. The vertical scalability of AIX Express Edition is limited to a maximum of four cores and 8 GB of memory per core in a single partition. AIX Express Edition does not include the Cluster Aware AIX capability of AIX 7 Standard or Enterprise Editions, AIX Express Edition also does not include the AIX Profile Manager plug-in to IBM Systems Director but AIX Express Edition can be managed by the AIX Profile Manager. Clients can configure the system with multiple partitions running AIX Express Edition, but each partition is limited to a maximum of four cores and a total of 32 GB of memory per partition. AIX Express Edition is primarily intended for clients who do not need the extreme levels of vertical scalability of AIX Standard or Enterprise Editions particularly when consolidating a number of smaller workloads onto a larger server. AIX Express Edition is also suitable for clients with small workloads on platforms such as entry or Blade servers.

All editions of AIX 7 are available on all models in the IBM Power Systems hardware product line. Clients may mix the different editions on a single server. AIX Version 5.3 is only available in a Standard Edition.