Wednesday, October 26, 2011

AIX Version 5.3

The IBM AIX 5L Version 5.3 has been withdrawn from the market, effective April 29, 2011.
Highlights
• Well-proven, scalable, open, standards-based UNIX® operating system
• IBM POWER5™ technology and Virtualization Engine™ enablement help deliver power, increase utilization, ease administration and reduce total cost
• Rock-solid security and availability to help protect IT assets and keep businesses running
• Linux® affinity enables fast, cost-effective development of cross-platform applications
Accept no limits, make no compromises
In today’s on demand world, clients need a safe, secure, stable and flexible operating environment to run their organizations. That is why more and more businesses large and small are choosing AIX 5L™ for POWER™, IBM’s industrial-strength UNIX operating system (OS), for their mission-critical applications. With its proven scalability, reliability and manageability, the AIX 5L OS is an excellent choice for building a flexible IT infrastructure and is the only UNIX operating system that leverages IBM experience in building solutions that run businesses worldwide. And only one UNIX operating system leads the industry in vision and delivery of advanced support for 64-bit scalability, virtualization and affinity for Linux. That operating system is AIX 5L.
AIX 5L is an open, standards-based OS that conforms to The Open Group’s Single UNIX Specification Version 3. It provides fully integrated support for 32- and 64-bit applications. AIX 5L supports the IBM System p5™, IBM eServer™ p5, IBM eServer pSeries®, IBM eServer i5 and IBM RS/6000® server product lines, as well as IBM BladeCenter® JS2x blades and IntelliStation® POWER and RS/6000 workstations. In addition to compliance with UNIX standards, AIX 5L includes commands and application programming interfaces to ease the porting of applications from Linux to AIX 5L.
AIX 5L Version 5.3 offers new levels of innovative self-management technologies. It continues to exploit current 64-bit system and software architecture to support advanced virtualization options, as well as IBM POWER5 and POWER5+™ processors with simultaneous multithreading capability for improved performance and system utilization. AIX 5L V5.3 is enhanced to support the IBM Virtualization Engine systems technology innovations available on POWER5 and POWER5+ systems, including Micro-Partitioning™ and Virtual I/O Server support.
AIX 5L V5.3 also includes the advanced distributed file system NFSv4. NFSv4 is an open, standards-based distributed file system that offers superior security, interoperability and scalability. AIX 5L was the first commercial UNIX vendor to include NFSv4. IBM includes advanced NFSv4 file system federation and replication management capabilities.
AIX 5L V5.3 provides improved system security, enhanced performance analysis and tuning tools and added system management tools. This AIX 5L release underscores IBM’s firm commitment to long-term UNIX innovations that deliver business value.

Friday, October 21, 2011

AIX videos Links

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/WikiPtype/Movies#Movies-power7


Welcome to the POWER6/POWER7 and AIX6 Hands-On Technical Product Demos
The idea is to provide the "cook book" information to get your started with these new interesting technologies and to answer some basic questions:

•What is it about?
•How do I get started?
•What are a few typical first good uses I could start with?
•How easy is it to use?
•How could this save me time or money?
•Where can I get more information?
We hope you find these movies interesting and let you make a flying start.

Currently, the movies add up to 20.6 hours of free education on the hottest topics.

Quick links to the main sections:

1.POWER7 Processor
2.AIX Workload Partitions
3.AIX6 and AIX7 Operating System Features
4.POWER6 Processor Features
5.Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM)
6.Other Cool & Interesting Stuff
7.IBM System Director 6 on AIX
8.Thirteen More Director 6 Movies
9.Back to POWER Basics
10.New Virtualisation Features
11.PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 for AIX
The latest movies added are:

•2nd Sept 2010 - How Systems Director Saves Me Time - movie 84
•12th Jan 2011 - Shared Storage Pools Hands-On - movie 85
•28th Jan 2011 - Shared Storage Pools Intro - movie 86
•March 2011 - HACMP = PowerHA System Mirror
◦On this Techdocs website the famous Shawn Bodily, Power/AIX Advanced Technical Skills, USA presents four technical movies on AIX High Availability. These are in .mov format. I had to download Apple QuickTime to view them as other players don't work (mostly audio problems).
•PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 for AIX by HACMP Guru Alex Abderrazag - this includes a set of 6 movies:
1.PowerHA Introduction to a typical environment used in the movies
2.PowerHA Configuration via SMIT
3.PowerHA The "clmgr" command
4.PowerHA High Availability in Action
5.PowerHA SAN Communications
6.PowerHA Application Monitoring
Notes on getting the movies to work on your PC:

•These movies are in Windows Movie Format (.wmv) to make them small enough to watch over the internet or download but this means some quality has been lost from the Audio Video Interleave (.avi) originals which are 60 MB to 90 MBs in size.
•When tested on some PCs it took 4 to 5 minutes to start the movie - please be patient and don't just assume its broken - some browsers download the entire movie before they start playing it.
•Other browsers handle the media file differently - some start Windows Media Player and some start it within the browser itself. Also I have found that some auto resize the movie to fit the window - so start the movie in a suitable sized browser window. The movies where first recorded at 1024x768 but later ones at 800x600 but higher resolution. Sorry but I rather create new movies than try to regenerate them all to one size. If the movie does not fit your screen the best fix is to upgrade your screen to at least 1280x1024
•If all else fails try to download the .wmv file and play locally on your machine: using Right Click on the Download link below and selecting "Save Link as" or "Save Target as". This may highlight your PC does not support this format (good luck sorting that out!).
•Linux workstation users - ideas please, can Linux handle the .mwv format? If so, how or a good alternative solution is welcome.
◦I am told that Linux can indeed play this format - have a look at this website for hints Ubuntu - Installing Mplayer Codecs and installing OpenSUSE codecs is really simple too.
•Windows 7 users - some of the older movies do not work with Windows 7 Media Player. This appears to be missing CODEC's from Windows 7 that were in early Windows versions send your comments to Microsoft. We fixed this by downloading the ACELP CODEC from http://www.voiceage.com/acelp_eval.php - strictly at your own risk. I installed the Vista-64 version as I run Windows 7. Then watching the movie via the Windows Media Center (not the Player).
•For Windows 7 these movies have been remastered (August 2010) to fix Windows 7 problems of lack of certain CODECs found in earlier Windows versions, poor audio or hangs half way through: DFP, HMC7 Partition Mobility, Memory Keys, Partition Priority, CPU Pools and Monitoring Pools, Ganglia and PowerVM LX86.
•Feed back and further ideas for movies to Nigel Griffiths - nag at uk dot ibm dot com

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Migration of AIX LPAR from one hardware to other

Supported Methods of Duplicating an AIX System


Technote (FAQ)

Question
I would like to move, duplicate, or clone an AIX system onto another partition or hardware. How can I accomplish this?



Answer
This document describes the supported methods of duplicating, or cloning, an AIX instance to create new systems based on an existing one. It also describes methods known to us that are not supported and will not work.
Why Duplicate A System?
Duplicating an installed and configured AIX system has some advantages over installing AIX from scratch, and can be a faster way to get a new LPAR or system up and running.

Using this method customized configuration files, installation of additional AIX filesets, application configurations and tuning parameters can be set up once and then installed on another system or partition.


Supported Methods

1. Cloning a system via mksysb backup from one system and restore to new system.

This can either be a mksysb backup of the rootvg from the source system to tape, DVD, or a file on a NIM server.

If the mksysb is going to be used to create a new machine, make sure to set 'recover devices' to NO when it is restored. This will insure that devices existing on the source machine aren't added to the ODM of the target machine.


2. Using the alt_disk_copy command.

If you have extra disks on your system, or have disks you would like to associate with one system, load a rootvg, then remove them and associate with a new system, this is a good way to copy the rootvg to them.

The basic command to do this would be:

# alt_disk_copy -BOd hdiskx

The -B option tells alt_disk_copy not to change the bootlist to this new copy of rootvg, the -O option will remove devices from your customized ODM database.

From the alt_disk_copy man page:

-O
Performs a device reset on the target altinst_rootvg. This causes
the alternate disk install to not retain any user-defined device
configurations. This flag is useful if the target disk or disks
become the rootvg of a different system (such as in the case of
logical partitioning or system disk swap).

When the disks containing this altinst_rootvg are moved to another host and then booted from, AIX will run cfgmgr and probe for any hardware, adding ODM information at that time.


3. Using alt_disk_mksysb to install a mksysb image on another disk.

Using this technique a mksysb image is first created, either to a file, on CD or DVD or tape.

Then that mksysb image is restored to unused disks in the current system using alt_disk_mksysb, again using the -O option to perform a device reset.

After this the disks could be removed and placed in a new system, or via fibre rezoned to a new system, and the rootvg booted up.


Advanced Techniques

1. Live Partition Mobility

Using the Live Partition Mobility feature of AIX you can migrate an AIX LPAR and applications from one LPAR to another while it is up and running. Please see the AIX Manual for further information:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/topic/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/lpm_overview.htm


2. Higher Availability Using SAN Services

There are methods not described here, which have been documented by DeveloperWorks.
Please refer to the document "AIX higher availability using SAN services" for details.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-AIX_HA_SAN/index.html


Unsupported Methods

1. Using a bitwise copy of a rootvg disk to another disk.

This bitwise copy can be a one-time snapshot copy such as flashcopy, from one disk to another, or a continuously-updating copy method, such as Metro Mirror.

While these methods will give you an exact duplicate of the installed AIX operating system, the copy of the OS may not be bootable.


2. Removing the rootvg disks from one system and inserting into another.

This also applies to re-zoning SAN disks that contain the rootvg so another host can see them and attempt to boot from them.


Why don't these methods work?

The reason for this is there are many objects in an AIX system that are unique to it; Hardware location codes, World-Wide Port Names, partition identifiers, and Vital Product Data (VPD) to name a few. Most of these objects or identifiers are stored in the ODM and used by AIX commands.

If a disk containing the AIX rootvg in one system is copied bit-for-bit (or removed), then inserted in another system, the firmware in the second system will describe an entirely different device tree than the AIX ODM expects to find, because it is operating on different hardware. Devices that were previously seen will show missing or removed, and usually the system will typically fail to boot with LED 554 (unknown boot disk).