2007-11-08

AIX 6 goes General Availability

AIX 6.1 was released earlier this week. During the initial beta phase, they were considering calling it AIX 5.4.  There was no AIX 5.4, nor was there a 6.0.  They're debuting AIX 6 as version 6.1. 


AIX is IBM's enterprise UNIX offering for their pSeries servers, which replaced the old RS/6000 line years ago. New features include:
  • Improved RBAC (Role Based Access Control) functionality
  • Workload Partition (WPAR) virtualization - multiple virtual environments within one AIX instance, versus Logical Partition (LPAR) virtualization, which is multiple AIX instances on one system.
  • Support for Encrypted Journaling file systems (JFS2/EFS)
  • Trusted Computing Base - An optional secure-by-default installation
  • AIX Security Expert - a template-based console for setting up security options
  • Concurrent kernel updates - no reboot needed for certain types of kernel upgrades
  • First-failure data capture functionality to aid in troubleshooting or reproducing obscure faults
  • System routines that can gracefully recover from certain kernel crashes
I've had some time to use AIX 6 while it was in beta, and I must say that I'm impressed by the enhancements that I've been able to use so far.  Built-in virtualization is slick and seems to be working well in the general available release of AIX 6.1 now that it's out of beta.  You won't likely be playing with AIX on your next workstation, but you'll start to see it rolling out to an enterprise environment near you.

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