AIX 7.2 Software
Announcements
AIX V7.2 is
available in two different editions:
AIX 7.2 standard edition: The AIX 7.2 standard edition is the
edition that many people would think of as “AIX.” AIX 7.2 standard edition is
eligible to run on any POWER7, POWER7+ and POWER8 server.
AIX 7.2 enterprise edition: The AIX 7.2 enterprise edition includes
all the UNIX capabilities of AIX standard edition, but also includes
significant enhancements that come with the inclusion of PowerVC, PowerSC™, IBM
Cloud Manager with OpenStack, IBM Tivoli® Monitoring and IBM BigFix Lifecycle
AIX enterprise edition includes all of these products under a single ordering
and support structure.
Quick overview
IBM’s latest announcement brings us to AIX version 7.2, which will provide for Live Update for
Interim Fixes, Server Based Flash Caching, 40G RoCE for Oracle RAC performance
and vNIC adapters we can use with SRIOV adapters that will provide for quality
of service (QOS) settings. The vNIC will also help us use SRIOV adapters with Live
Partition Mobility, which was one of the drawbacks of SRIOV before. vNIC will
be more efficient than using shared Ethernet adapters (SEA) in our VIO servers.
vNIC will also work with AIX 7.1 TL4, so you do not necessarily need to upgrade
to AIX 7.2 to take advantage of it.
Detailed Overview
The AIX operating system is enhanced to provide
the following significant new capabilities in AIX V7.2:
1- AIX
version 7.2 is binary compatible with previous versions of the AIX OS,
including AIX 6™, AIX 5L and even earlier versions of AIX. This means that
applications that ran on earlier versions of AIX will continue to run on AIX
7.2—guaranteed.
2- AIX
live update – This capability, an industry first, is the step 1 of the journey
to completely eliminate planned downtime. Many enterprises have low tolerance
for planned downtime and this solution helps them avoid rebooting the server
when interim kernel fixes are applied.
3- Cluster
aware AIX (CAA) adds automatic repository replacement mechanism – Built-in
cluster aware AIX capability was first released on AIX V7 with commands and
programming APIs for creating clusters from a group of AIX instances.
Kernel-based heartbeat, monitoring and event infrastructure was enabled for
easy cluster management. Extending the automation and reliability further, AIX
7.2 adds support for automated replacement of a failed repository disk with
predefined backup repository disk.
4- The
SRIOV-backed vNIC, or dedicated vNIC, feature provides the second generation of
PowerVM® virtual Ethernet technology. This enables the client LPAR to have
direct access to the SRIOV adapter resources residing in VIOS and avoids data
copy between client LPAR and VIOS. The dedicated VNIC feature offers better
performance and scalability as well as the QoS capability honored by the SRIOV
adapters. Furthermore, a LPAR with vNIC devices is LPM capable.
5- New
support for high speed Mellanox connections using RDSv3 protocol, typically
used for Oracle RAC cluster for higher performance.
6- AIX
dynamic system optimizer is now included in AIX 7.2 standard edition, and is
designed to automatically improve the performance of workloads.
7- IBM
BigFix® lifecycle V9.2 provides an automated, simplified patching process
administered from a single console. It provides near real-time visibility and
enforcement to deploy and manage patches to all distributed endpoints. This
offering will ship with AIX 7.1 and 7.2 enterprise editions.
8- AIX
7.2 continues to support the consolidation of older, AIX V5.3 environments to
new technology through “AIX 5.3 workload partitions for AIX 7”. Administrators
can simply back up an existing LPAR running AIX 5.3 and restore it into an AIX
V7 workload partition.
9- PowerVM
live partition mobility: This capability of POWER6, POWER7 and POWER8
processor-based systems allows an entire running logical partition to be relocated
from one server to another. The relocation is transparent to the end user and
occurs with no application downtime. Live partition mobility can enable
increased availability, workload balancing and energy savings.
10- PowerVM
shared dedicated capacity: This configuration option for dedicated processor
partitions enables the administrator to donate excess processor cycles to a
shared processor pool without affecting the workload running in the dedicated
processor partition.
11- PowerVM
multiple shared processor pools: Systems based on POWER6, POWER7, or POWER8
processors support multiple separate shared processor pools. This feature can
be used for additional control of processor resource allocations and
potentially can reduce the license charges for applications running in a micro
partition.
12- PowerVM
Active Memory™ sharing: Active Memory sharing allows the PowerVM hypervisor to
automatically reallocate physical system memory between logical partitions
(LPARs) for flexibility in workload consolidation.
Out of Support
Out of Support
Program Number
|
Program Release Name
|
Withdrawal From support date
|
5765-G90
|
AIX V6.1 Express edition
|
April 30, 2017
|
5765-G62
|
AIX V6.1 Standard edition
|
April 30, 2017
|
5765-AEZ
|
AIX V6.1 Enterprise edition
|
April 30, 2017
|
5765-G99
|
AIX V7.1 Enterprise edition
|
September 30, 2016
|
Note: Reference took from IBM
I was trying to install AIX7.2 on IBM 9133-55A
Power5 machine under a LPAR and got the following message:
