Quote:
Originally Posted by
Irishango
Hi all,
first of all, beg your pardon for dummy questions. Please help me to sort it out.
I'm an internal consultant in a technology unit, and currently we are relocating some applications to another Data Center. In the old Data Center, applications are running on IBM AIX, mostly AIX 5.3. The IT team is saying that all these applications are virtualized.
We want to buy new servers in another Data Center for these applications. AIX 5.3 is already end of marketing, i.e. we cannot buy a new server with AIX 5.3. My IT department is saying that this means that we necessarily need to hire system integrators to migrate applications to AIX 6. That is quite expensive.
I don't quite understand their statement. I thought that if application is virtualized, you don't really care what is the version of the host OS. I.e. we can buy a new server with AIX 6.0 for the new Data Center and still run AIX 5.3 on it as a guest OS, without migrating the application.
Please let me know where the truth is. Many thanks!
IBM / AIX virtualisation means more than you are assuming. In the true virtualised environment a system will have a pair (or quad) Virtual I/O servers (VIO server). This effectively virtualises the network, SCSI (Fibre NPIV), and HDD.
The VIO servers are themselves LPARs on a P series frame but not of a normal type. Once the VIO servers have been created further LPARs can be created on the frame using the virtual I/O devices provided by the VIO server. This includes VIO provided paths to external disks or virtualised logical volumes on the VIO disk subsystem to provide Hard Disk Drives for LPAR use (rootvg etc).
Once the LPAR has been created it is loaded with an O/S. This can be AIX, Linux, or in special circumstances iseries (AS400). Restricting this example to AIX the LPAR can have a number of different versions of AIX up to and including AIX 7.1.
Therefore your assumption that 5.3 cannot be loaded onto an LPAR is incorrect. Equally incorrect is your assumption that you cannot purchase a new server loaded with AIX 5.3. The P series is delivered unconfigured with a number of processors, memory etc. Once installed the LPAR configuration takes place as I have indicated above. Also any application will run on an LPAR and have no knowledge of the fact that it is a virtualised environment. If your applications are not AIX 6.1 compatible then your LPARs in the new data centre will have to AIX 5.3.
You need to find out what the VIO environment is on the old servers and see if this can be replecated in the new data centre.
I hope this helps.