IBM Opens Up Beta for Future AIX 6

Published: May 22, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In London yesterday, IBM launched the first of what will be many System p and System i servers that will make use of its new dual-core Power6 processors. Hardware is only half of a system--and some would argue even less. Systems software is equally differentiating when it comes to servers these days. Which is why IBM is talking about its future AIX 6 operating system and opening it up for customer beta testing.

Formerly known as AIX 5.4 until the Power6 chip was launched this week, AIX 6 is the iteration of IBM's Unix variant that is specifically rejiggered to take advantage of all of the hardware features inside the Power6 chip and the related systems that employ it. It is never easy to pin Big Blue down on expected ship dates for AIX releases or Power processors, but it was pretty well expected in 2005 that both were planned to have a late 2006 launch. By early 2006, AIX 5.4 was pushed out to the second half of 2007, well beyond the original planned release of Power6 servers in late 2006 to early 2007, which is why the current AIX 5.3 was tweaked to support the new Power6 processor for the launch this week of the new system p 570, which scales from two to 16 Power6 cores running at from 3.5 GHz to 4.7 GHz. The lateness of AIX 6 compared to the original plan or the initial Power6 servers is not a new phenomenon. AIX 5.3 was about a year late to market when it came out in the fall of 2004, which compelled IBM to support the earlier AIX 5.2 release on the Power5 servers that were launched that year.

According to roadmaps published earlier this year, what has become AIX 6 was expected in October 2007 as AIX 5.4, but at yesterday's announcement of the System p 570 server using Power6 chips, Brad McCredie, the architect of the Power6 chip, said that AIX 6 was not expected until November 2007. AIX 6.1 is the first release of the operating system; apparently IBM does not believe in zero dot releases, which might be bad luck. IBM is also dropping the "L" for Linux part of the AIX name; the initial AIX release was AIX 5L, which was meant to imply affinity with Linux applications. Power-based servers actually run Linux and will soon have an emulation environment called PAVE that allows X86-Linux binaries to run unchanged on Power-Linux servers.

IBM announced this week that a pre-release version of AIX 6.1 will be available in an open beta in the third quarter of this year. In this beta program, IBM is not providing production-level software, nor is it providing enterprise-class tech support. The beta of AIX 6.1 will be available for download, and IBM is warning beta testers that some of the features in the beta code may not make it into the production code when it ships in November.

AIX 6.1 is expected to include a number of new server virtualization technologies. The first is called Workload Partition, or WPAR, which seems to be analogous to a virtual private server in Linux or Unix--what Sun Microsystems calls a container for its Solaris 10 Unix. With WPARs, IBM is providing a way to consolidate multiple AIX workloads into a single instance of AIX while providing security and administrative isolation between the WPARs. This is distinct from the current logical partitions, or LPARs, that have a hypervisor layer riding between the hardware and multiple instances of an operating system--in the case of IBM's System p and System i servers that's AIX, i5/OS, and Linux riding above the hypervisor. While IBM can have a single operating system instance span from a fraction of a processor core to all of the cores in a box using LPARs, each LPAR has its own full instance of the operating system, which can be a headache when it comes to upgrading and patching virtual servers.

IBM will also supply a separate new program called the Workload Partitions Manager with AIX 6.1, and this tool will be used to provide live migration of AIX partitions (and presumably i5/OS and Linux partitions, too) between two physical Power-based servers. This feature, called Application Mobility, will allow whole WPARs--including their live applications--to be moved from one machine to another. IBM actually demonstrated an Oracle 10g database migration on two Power6-based System p 570s in London this week, according to McCredie. These machines were linked together using a 10 Gigabit Ethernet network. Because the I/O is already virtualized in the servers, it is easy enough to move the pointers from a storage area network from one physical box to another one. The real trick with the Application Mobility feature in AIX 6.1 is grabbing the state of main memory and moving all that data across the 10 GE network in real time in such a way that end users do not see a blip in application performance.

AIX 6.1 is also expected to come with add-on security capabilities called Trusted AIX, mimicking the name that Sun had for its beefed up Solaris variant for years. Trusted AIX will be activated as an installation option for AIX 6.1, and it will provide multi-level, label-based security for data and applications--a requirement for governments and, increasingly, corporations. Access to all of the individual datasets, the applications that use them, and even what you can copy from a screen have to be controlled these days. Trusted AIX is IBM's answer. IBM is also planning to enhance role-based access control in AIX to have finer granularity in the authorization that security managers can assign to non-root users of the system, giving them selective, privileged access to certain system and application functions. AIX is also getting a trusted execution environment, which constantly monitors the integrity of the system. Further on the security front, IBM has created a setup called secure by default, which puts AIX 6.1 on a box with the minimum number of services enabled. This means administrators and security managers do not have to go into AIX and de-install or deactivate features that used to be installed by default to lock down their System p box. AIX 6.1 will sport IBM's Journal File System Extended (JFS2), which is a file system that now has built-in encryption.

Interestingly, AIX 6.1 is expected to have its own variant of dynamic tracing, called Probevue, which is analogous to Sun's DTrace probing utility for Solaris. With Probevue, programmers can insert dynamic trace points into existing applications so they can find bottlenecks and other issues without having to recompile the code. The trace points provide telemetry data back to the programmers as applications are running, which can dramatically speed up debugging and tuning. AIX 6.1 will also have a live dump feature, which will be able to have selected AIX subsystems dump the entire contents of the memory state and their related traces to the file system for detailed analysis to cope with gremlins in application code.

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