"The planned release of AIX 7 underscores the IBM commitment to continued UNIX innovation. IBM is designing AIX to be at the heart of systems that support smarter planet applications ranging from smart power grids to smarter traffic management," notes Jeff Howard, director of marketing for IBM Power Systems. "We expect that many of our clients and ISVs will participate in the AIX 7 open beta in order to be well positioned to exploit AIX 7 when it becomes generally available. Building on the success of AIX 6's open beta that helped hundreds of ISV's deliver certified applications at general availability, our AIX 7 open beta will help deliver smarter applications as well."

 

AIX 7 is designed to fully exploit the performance and energy management capabilities of the new POWER7-based Power Systems that IBM began shipping to customers earlier this year. By mid-September, if not sooner, IBM will offer a full range of Power System servers, including entry-level models and a new high-end powerhouse.

 

 

AIX 7 provides full binary compatibility for programs created on earlier versions of AIX including AIX 6, AIX 5, and 32-bit programs created on even earlier versions of AIX. This means that clients can protect previous investments in Power Systems by moving existing applications up to AIX 7 without having to recompile them. For more on AIX binary compatibility, check out http://www.ibm.com/power/software/aix/compatibility.

 

Another handy feature of AIX 7 will help organizations simplify consolidation of older AIX workloads onto AIX 7 partitions, letting them take advantage of POWER7 scalability and energy efficiency. With AIX 7, you can back up an existing AIX 5.2 environment and restore it inside of a Workload Partition on AIX 7. (IBM's IBM i 7.1 operating system, for instance, introduced a similar feature this spring.)

 

Some of the new key features of AIX 7 include:

 

• AIX 5.2 Workload Partitions for AIX 7 - This new enhancement to WPAR technology allows a client to backup an LPAR running AIX V5.2 and restore it into a WPAR running on AIX 7 on POWER7. This capability is designed to allow clients to easily consolidate smaller workloads running on older hardware onto larger, more efficient POWER7 systems. Although this capability is designed specifically for POWER7, it can be tested on older POWER processors during the open beta. Please note that this capability will only work with AIX 5.2
• Support for Fibre Channel adapters in a Workload Partition AIX 7 includes support to allow a physical or virtual fibre channel adapter to a WPAR. This allows WPAR to directly own SAN devices including tape devices using the ‘atape” device type. This capability is designed to expand the capabilities of a Workload Partition and simplify management of storage devices.

• Domain Support in Role Based Access Control - This enhancement to RBAC allows a security policy to restrict administrative access to a specific set of similar resources, such as a subset of the available network adapters. This allows IT organizations that host services for multiple tenants to restrict administrator access to only the resources associated with a particular tenant. Domains can be used to control access to Volume Groups, Filesystems, files, devices (in /dev)

• NIM thin server Network Installation Management (NIM) support for thin servers has been enhanced to support NFSV4 and IPv6. Thin Servers are diskless or dataless AIX instances that boot from a common AIX image via NFS.

• Etherchannel enhancements - Support for the 802.3AD Etherchannel has been enhanced to insure that a link is Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) ready before sending data packets.

 

The beta program is open to all, and is designed to provide clients and independent software vendors (ISVs) with early access to the AIX 7 operating system. For beta details, go to http://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/aix7ob/. The beta code is packaged as a DVD ISO image that beta participants can burn to physical media.