AIX or Linux on POWER (2010)

I had the great pleasure of adminstrating and deploying AIX for 6 years. It really is an extremely solid OS. During that time I also worked with HP-UX, which compared to AIX felt stuck in some oldschool UNIX limbo especially concerning storage handling felt extremely clunky. As mentioned in the article AIX's LVM implementation is a joy to use giving the administrator the ability to extend and SHRINK a live filesystem and LVM mirroring with AIX was rock solid. The AIX LPAR technology was very impressive and fun to work with. Perhaps the years have given my memories a rosy taint but working solely Linux now (OpenShift), I sort of miss those days with AIX.

Unless your product requires AIX to function, I recommend against AIX and POWER in general. You aren’t going to be able to get cheap POWER machines for distributed computing in the future. You can’t use Rust, Go, .NET at all. You can run Kubernetes unofficially, but cross your fingers that the images you want to run have a ppc64 build. Docker doesn’t even officially support the platform. [0]

There are severe limitations to AIX, and everything is just enough different to make things unpleasant.

[0] https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#architectu...

The largest problem with AIX for Linux people who have never seen it are the commands can operate differentially. But installing the GNU package gets around that. Actually in this case, I find AIX quite similar to the BSDs.

One quote that was interesting/funny based upon current happenings:

"All IBM need to do is create their own Linux distribution (Blue Linux perhaps?)"

:)

At my dj, we still have a fairly good amount of AIX, but not enough to only have to interact with a given AIX system maybe once every few days or so, so the learning curve is slowish. The OS seems much more linuxy than Sun-ny, it would seem??

Aix naturally.

This post, which talks about AIX 7.1 on POWER7, was published in August of 2010.

I feel like this link needs a date included in the title, since it describes POWER7 as being new (POWER7 came out in 2010)