Obtaining AIX
 

Hi,

My friend is interested in starting a small training institute which will help people learn AIX on a professional level.

He intends to buy IBM hardware, p-series box , switches etc.

Hardware obviously costs money and he is okay to shed some.

So my question is , Assuming you can afford to buy, can you legally buy AIX from IBM as a single person ?

Can he buy softwares like HACMP for clustering, VIO for virtualization etc from IBM specifically for himself ?

Right now all he has , is some deprecated old ibm hardware but he has no os to install obviously.

Thanks.

AIX typically comes with the hardware, and is licensed/supported the same way as you renew your support contract. AIX is ALSO tied to hardware...that is, even though your hardware may have plenty of capacity, you won't be able to upgrade past a certain point, ever. If he has some old hardware, the only thing your 'friend' will be able to load on it is an old version of AIX. And if I was paying for a 'professional level' course and they sat me down on old hardware with an old version of the OS, I'd walk out and get my money back.

IBM doesn't care who buys what...if you've got the money, they'll sell to you. Contact an authorized IBM sales rep, and purchase from them.

Okay I get the point.

But generally speaking buying stuff like VIO , HACMP etc does cost a huge amount right ?

I think I'll advise my friend to talk to IBM sales.

Right now he has his eyes on old hardware , so I'll pass on to him that its not worth it.

Thanks.

Could also look at leasing an AIX server. At my last job we used to host a RS\6000 with AIX for our ERP and eventually migrated over to a data center where we paid around $650 USD a month for a small AIX 6.1 server that served approx 80 users. Can't remember the specs, but it was something ancient from like the early to mid 1990s. 512MB of RAM or something -- maybe even 256.

Have some old AIX 6.1 CDs laying around the house somewhere ... but unfortunately can't do much with them without the hardware! Can always buy a used RS6000 on EBay, but don't think many would want to learn on that. My company pushed to have our department switch from AIX to Red Hat purely for cost savings, but we ended up staying with AIX.

IBM is certaintly not cheap, that's for sure. :hattip:

no crap :)

wasnt 6 series launched somewhere around 2010 ? 6.1 had primarily JFS2 as far as I can tell , the power to dynamically allocate inodes (that too online).

and a lot of outsourcing still done these days to save further.

AIX is good , its easier to learn than linux for sure. linux is endless given that it supports so much stuff in every aspect , but nevertheless I find myself better with it ( that doesnt mean I dont respect AIX admins though ).

Yep, 6 was released somewhere around there. We were still running the original box we got in the early 90s (way before my time - I may not have even been born). I'm assuming that some hardware upgrades took place to the original box.

Only ever did basic things like fixing print queues, killing processes and user sessions in AIX, but certainly was interesting to get a chance to take a look around on a live system. Have only met one AIX sys admin in my life and that was my prior boss.

Funny you mention outsourcing ... all UNIX servers - well everything really minus local IT support - in our company are now supported by a very large IT consulting company in India. Certainly the way of the future.

This is good for my country, but the local people must be taking a hit.

Personally I think we need more idea-based job creators. The concept of operating systems really boomed and expanded into virtualization , and is still being explored.

I think its time we find more horizons. People in the west are more entrepreneurial in nature. We indians lack that , so there is hope for the West the way I see it.

In the short term? Yes. Medium-to-Long term? No.

Mainly because most of the companies who have done this wind up pulling everything BACK in a fairly short time, or at least when the contract is up. Poor support is typically the reason. I can think of at least 10 of my current clients who have cited that directly as the reason.

I can understand that upto some extent, because most people here struggle with basic good english. They also fail to recognize that the way Americans talk and Indians talk are poles apart, so the communication skills are not always efficient. Even I had the same problem before discussing issues on forums like LQ.

What kind of poor support do you mean ? technical or business nature oriented ?

Both, and I've experienced both first hand, MANY times. And it's typically not English/communication skills related at all. The outsourcing companies typically sell their services by saying you'll have an SLA response time of x minutes, 24/7/365 (or whatever is contracted). Fine...so you've got a warm body in a seat, that you can reach. Qualified and motivated to get things done? Not necessarily. The typical responses are:

• "Let me research that and call you back"
• "Can you email us the logs to analyze?"
• "Let me escalate this..."

or similar things. None of which get things DONE, but has the SLA been met? Absolutely. You will occasionally get someone who will stay with you, and get things going, but probably 90% of the time or more, it's a blow-off type answer like the ones above. Just look around this forum (and many others like it), and you'll see people with 'certifications' asking questions that are blindingly obvious to someone with the skills needed to get a 'certification'. Or "I have a client who needs xxxxx...help?".

EMC is a good company to look at. They have call centers all around the world, available 24/7/365. The difference is, all of those people work for EMC, and are held accountable. There is no passing the buck..there is getting things done. That sense of urgency and responsibility is typically lacking in most outsourcing companies, because the business of their CLIENT is not THEIR BUSINESS. Technically, they are fulfilling their SLA and client requirements, but that only buys you a short time before frustration sets in, and the client gets rid of them. My company has fixed hundreds of programs done by freelancers who bid $50 for a programming job. Lowest bid, so the client bites...gets a program worth $5 instead, with no documentation (not part of the deal, remember? Hired to program...), that typically will only work if things are **JUST RIGHT**.

TECHNICALLY, the program has been written and delivered. But it turns out not usable/shaky/scalable/whatever, and the client then has to pay us not only to do the original job, but undo the mess the original 'low bid' caused.

This is saying nothing against anyone, but the way the contracts are typically written gives companies the loopholes needed to keep doing it. They lose one client, but get two more who are new to the game, and look at the short-term gain. Then that middle manager leaves, someone else comes in and pulls things back in house...until the NEXT middle-manager comes in to 'save us money and help us grow', by outsourcing again.

And the wheels on the bus go round and round....

I completely understand your frustration. Sometimes it's plain laziness or sloppy work, without understanding the gravity of the client's needs. I have witnessed this myself when I worked as a AIX admin. My colleague was a linux sys admin , and one of the guys in his team members was asked to finish a job with a script. He didnt even check if the script worked and called it a day, adding to the frustration of the clients and extra work for other team members. Despite making the employees understand the value of fast service and customer satisfaction , its ridiculous to see that some senior technical people forget what they stand for - service.

Meeting SLA is one thing though, I have heard far worse from other people about database admins accidentally truncating production database tables ( accidentally right clicking in putty terminal - highly dangerous habit) , deleting production data without valid client email confirmation and sometimes much worse.

All this business oriented attitude is usually difficult to absorb by people in developing or third-world countries. I feel the client should stress and clarify that employees at upto the mark, (its their business affected after all), else they will meet nothing more than frustration. unfortunately all the firm can do is follow a certain process since its ISO certified and that's exactly what its employees follow. Also they have many clients. I think the people wanting to do business with such firms already understand the trade-off between cost cutting and quality of service.

I have heard tickets get expired just getting passed from one team to another.

Couldnt be more true.

Maybe there should like a KPI for a firm that should be shared with all clients who intend to do business with it. It's hard to go against a contract/protocol that you have already agreed to. Sometimes firms attract people just by brand name alone.

check this page out, from david cantrell's blog the infamous slackware dev, and Im pleasantly surprised for no reason :)

http://blog.burdell.org/2015/08/neve...-from-ibm.html

For a bit of historical perspective:

Roughly speaking - For the first Years of IBM RISC (later POWER) see: http://www.rootvg.net/content/view/20/2/

In 2004 - AIX 5.3 came - with POWER5
In 2007 - AIX 6.1 (twp weeks before release re-branded from AIX 5.4 to AIX 6.1 - time to drop the L from AIX5L); first version with written binary compatibility guarantee (before compatibility was expected and supported on best effort basis, but not 'written')
In 2010 - AIX 7.1 - needed a major release to increase supported processors from 64 to 256 (threads aka logical cpu from 128 to 1024)
In 2013 - POWER8 - and AIX 7.2 - I think, was released in 2014.

Getting back to HW: AIX 5.2 required the CHRP platform, AIX 6.1 requires POWER4 and later, AIX 7.2 requires POWER7 and later.

As far as learning basic skills, how sys admin is done, etc. You could still learn the basics on AIX 4.3 - but I would recommend AIX 6.1 or later - so you have (most of) the current generation security skills (RBAC, TE in particular). AIXPERT is available since AIX 5.3 ML04 (2003-2004), audit since 1995 (if not earlier), etc..

Yes: there are new features being added regularly. Sometimes before others (e.g., RBAC/TE in the kernel, audit in the kernel), others later (e.g., Live Kernel Update). Although as far back as 1994 AIX was 'famous' for being up and patched - without a reboot for periods over 365 days, i.e., not every patch requires a reboot).

Thus, for education - it is 'sexy' to have the latest hardware, but not an absolute necessity. A specific application that needs the 'latest' may set your requirements - but not core AIX administration.