Quote:
Originally Posted by
Colin_Fearnley
I am very curious to find out how AIX admins keep up to date and refreshed with all of the options and features of AIX without having access to a test environment?
That (the fact that IBM has no AIX system at a price affordable for a singular person) is perhaps the most unwise (to avoid a stronger term) decision IBM ever has come up with and probably will - in the long run - be the undoing of AIX.
Sun Microsystems, for a long time, showered universities with lots of hardware at minimal prices (if not free of cost at all: "You want to buy some E4500? Great, we give you some good rebate and chip in 5 U05 for free.") and that served to educate the physicists, chemists, etc. in SunOS/Solaris. Most of the physicists don't work in physics but end up doing software engineering or systems administration and when these were asked which UNIX platform to select for a project - guess, which one they chose.
IBM, on the other hand, never had anything comparable to a U05 in the last ten years. If you want some equipment for playing around with Linux virtualisation you buy some better-than-average PC for, say, $ 1000 and start playing around. If you want some playground for AIX virtualisation you buy a HMC, a 822, a few licenses and you are conveniently set back some $50k. I, for my part, can't afford that.
All that leads to a severe lack of new blood. The average IBM shop has admins in my age range on average - and i am 55. We are the new MVS admins - another species rapidly being taken care of by biology.
So, to answer your question: i always make it a point that customers have some test equipment because i sure know i can't do tests for new things at home on my own. Second, i am an avid reader of documentation and whenever new features come up i read up on them, even if i can't try them always out. And, finally: AIX environments are a lot more static than i.e. Linux environments, so there is no need to be as innovative as with those. A typical AIX shop ten years ago ran about half a dozen applications (SAP, DB/2, Oracle, Informatica, Websphere, TSM) and that was it. A current AIX shop does the same, just the versions have changed. Therefore it is somewhat easier to keep up.
Does that answer your question?
bakunin