IBM Says AIX 6 Beta Program Off to a Good Start

Published: July 12, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As it promised would do back in May, IBM this week opened up a beta testing program for its future AIX 6 operating system for its Power and PowerPC servers and workstations. AIX 6, which was known as AIX 5.4 during its earlier development phase, was supposed to roughly coincide with the launch of the Power5 processors but it made its debut in May as a future product when Big Blue shipped its first Power6-based server, a variant of the System p 570 midrange server that has been retrofitted to accept the new chip.

As is the case with other operating systems, AIX 6 doesn't just run on new iron, but is supported on prior generations of servers. With AIX 6, IBM is supporting servers and workstations based on Power4, Power4+, Power5, Power5+, Power6, and PowerPC 970 processors, which are all 64-bit machines and which all have binary compatibility for applications written for prior releases of AIX 5L. IBM is currently supporting a tweaked version of the AIX 5.3 operating system on the Power6-based System p 570, but obviously this edition of the operating system does not have the new features that are in AIX 6.

According to Jay Kruemcke, System p AIX offering manager at IBM, the AIX 6 open beta program is the first such open beta that IBM has ever had for an AIX release. This may sound odd, since IBM has been a serious player in the Unix server and workstation market since the RS/6000s were announced in February 1990. But, for whatever reason, IBM has always used controlled betas with customers and independent software vendors to pre-test its AIX code until now.

The AIX beta was opened up late on Monday and people started poking around to download the code on Tuesday morning; beta testers found the code randomly on IBM's site, since the beta did not officially open up until Thursday morning. Without even making an announcement, 200 people came and downloaded the beta code, according to Kruemcke, who expects thousands of beta testers to come and play with the new operating system between now and whenever AIX 6 ships in the fourth quarter. The word on the street is that AIX 6 will come out in October, but IBM has said nothing officially about a general availability date--most likely in case the software requires more beta testing.

Kruemcke says that the beta code is a simplified setup of the AIX 6 code that is called MakesysB, which is a backup of an existing IBM system running the AIX 6 beta code that can be restored on a machine using the above-mentioned Power and PowerPC processors. The code will run in standalone mode on pSeries and System p servers as well as in logical partitions on these machines, and it will also run on IBM's iSeries and System i proprietary midrange servers, which also use Power processors and which support AIX in logical partitions. While the code should run on AIX boxes that have been rebadged by French server maker Bull, technically speaking, IBM is not "supporting" them in the beta program. Support is in quotes because IBM is not offering any support at all for beta users of AIX 6 participating in the open beta program.

As part of the beta program, which you can participate in by going to the AIX site, IBM is providing release notes, which describe many of the new features in the operating system, such as Workload Partitions (a new kind of partition that is akin to a Solaris container), Live Application Mobility (which allows running applications to be moved between the Workload Partitions on two distinct physical machines), the integrated encryption of data, and the Trusted AIX security extensions. IBM is also putting out the early edition of the full set of AIX 6 support documents and publications, and open beta testers have access to a forum that will be used to give IBM feedback on issues and to create trouble tickets for bugs to be introduced into the internal AIX development system down in Austin, Texas.

Incidentally, the new encryption feature is not supported fully in the AIX 6 open beta, and neither is Trusted AIX, which requires a fresh system install. The new partitioning features are there, and IBM is expecting that this feature is what will draw many customers to play with the software. Kruemcke says that 98 percent of the product that will eventually ship is in the open beta.

Concurrently with the open beta for AIX 6, IBM is running its traditional closed beta program, which typically has two or three dozen customers who get the full set of code. "These traditional beta testers get a significant level of support from IBM, but they also make a big commitment to really test the software and invest in the resources to do it properly." In a traditional beta program for AIX, IBM usually does two snapshots of the AIX code and releases it for testing, but the traditional beta already started and the open beta is early enough that IBM could do more snapshots to shake out bugs in the code.

In addition to these open and traditional beta testers, IBM has about 100 internal people and departments who are giving AIX 6 a spin before it gets released. Many of these testers are AIX specialists who want to know the ins and outs of the actual code before they start working with customers, but in some cases, IBM is eating its own dog food and testing AIX 6 in production on its own systems.

Customers using AIX 4, which dates from the mid-1990s, and AIX 5L, which previewed in April 2001 and shipped in November 2001, can upgrade directly to AIX 6 when it is generally available this fall. They do not have to two-step it from AIX 4 to AIX 5 or from an earlier AIX 5 release to a more recent one and then to AIX 6 to get on the newest operating system.

IBM has put out three releases of AIX since 2001, and AIX 6 will make four when it ships approximately six years after the launch of AIX 5L back then. While the last release of AIX 4 was at end of service three years ago, and extended support for the product was removed last year, there are still a few customers using the software, according to Kruemcke. But the vast majority of the AIX base has moved to AIX 5, which has logical partitioning support and tunings for each generation of Power and PowerPC processors, among other things.

IBM has not changed its AIX pricing substantially since AIX 5.3 was announced in 2004, and it seems unlikely that IBM will try to charge extra for new features that are coming with AIX 6.

"The Unix market does not really support separately priced features very well," says Kruemcke. "We see no reason to move away from our strategy of having AIX be an all-inclusive product."

That said, IBM does carve out its Advanced Power Virtualization hypervisor, which creates logical partitions for AIX, Linux, and i5/OS on pSeries and System p servers, as a separate item on its entry servers. The company does this to better compete with Windows and Linux, which until recently did not have integrated hypervisors and which still do not include the preferred ESX Server hypervisor from VMware by default.

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