Topics: AIX

AIX Introduction

AIX 5LAIX is short for Advanced Interactive eXecutive.

AIX is the UNIX operating system from IBM for RS/6000, pSeries and the latest Power systems. Currently, it is called "System P". IBM is nowadays the largest UNIX hardware vendor worldwide. AIX and RS/6000 was released on the 14th of February, 1990 in London.

Currently, the latest release of AIX is version 6.1. Also AIX 5.3 exists and is still supported by IBM. Older versions (e.g. 3.2.5, 4.3.3., 5.1 and 5.2) have reached end-of-program services and thus are no longer supported by IBM.

AIX supports Logical Partioning (short: LPAR). With LPAR you can create mulitple system environments on a single machine, thus sharing the processor and memory resources of a single machine by several operating system instances. From AIX 5.2 on, AIX supports DLPAR, Dynamic Logical Partitioning, which enables administrators to add, remove or move system resouces such as memory, adapters and CPU between partitions without the need to reboot each partion. From AIX 5.3, AIX supports micro-partitioning. With LPAR, a single CPU can only be used by a single Operating System instance. With micro-partitioning, a CPU can be shared by up to 10 operating system instances. From AIX 5.3 also the sharing of disk and network resources by several operating system instances is supported. Later versions of AIX and Power hardware now also include the ability to share I/O amongst several operating system images, through the use of a Virtual I/O server (VIO).

IBM used to supply Maintenance Levels for AIX. Nowadays, they supply Technology Levels, one in February and one in July each year.



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