AIX

Hi everybody.

is anyone using versioned WPAR's?
Has anyone clustered them with PowerHA?

Please share your experience.

Regards, firefox

In any environment i came into WPAR were frowned upon and ultimately they weren't used. There is simply not enough gain in it to use them, IMHO. A WPAR is a sort-of chroot-environment with some management extensions decorating it and it is (IMHO) by far easier to manage LPARs than to manage WPARs within an LPAR. You will have less dependencies, less restrictions and less hassle overall with LPARs, whereas the WPARs only give you a (very small) advantage in terms of necessary disk space and maybe a slightly better usage of given resources (memory, CPU) - but even this is doubtful.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Hi bakunin,

I totally agree.

The problem is, one of our customers needs to run old AIX5.2 and 5.3 Systems on P7 Hardware (applications do not run on AIX6 or AIX7). The only way to do this is to use the versioned WPAR's. And after all he wants these applications to be highly available

Hi Firefox,

Best of luck with this one, there is some reasonable information here and you can investigate the Red Books library.

The above links should take you to relevant material.

Regards

Dave

OK. I could say i pity you but my compassion wouldn't help you at all.

AIX 5.3 (ML12) LPARs definitely run natively on P7 hardware if you activate "Power6-compatibility mode" (or something such, can't remember). I have had exactly this some 2 years ago, when we migrated LPARs from some P5-systems to a p795.

In the meantime this is not mentioned any more because 5.3 reached its end of life, but whatever you do, you won't reach any supported state at all anyways. Not with 5.3 and even less so with 5.2 (which was, along with 5.1, a big PITA even back then when it was supported - if i were to decide between 5.1 and 5.2 at the point of a gun, i'd prefer pulling the trigger).

My suggestion is to create LPARs and try starting them with 5.3 and 5.2 respectively and see how far it gets you. If HACMP comes into play anyways this is an additional reason not to use WPARs. I couldn't even imagine building a cluster from WPAR nodes.

Another question: why don't you try to get some P6- or P5-hardware which ran AIX 5.x for years? What is the reason for needing a P7? I suppose you don't have performance problems when the software is built for AIX version 5.2, have you? It must have run with a p690 ("Regatta"), which was the high end back then when AIX 5.2 was modern, no?

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Hi,

I'm in full agreement with bakunin on this.

Regards

Dave

Hi,

until now I don't have much information about the project, kickoff meeting will be this month.
This is the information I got in advance. Of course I will do everything to avoid using WPAR's, but that is what the customer was asking for.
I was just wondering if anybody has experience with a config like that.
Wish me luck that I won't need it

Regards, ff