5765-AEZ IBM AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1

IBM United States Sales Manual
Revised:  December 16, 2015.

Table of contents

Product life cycle dates Description Program number Operating environment Abstract Planning information Product positioning Publications Highlights Security, auditability, and control

 

Product life cycle dates

Program Number	VRM	Announced	Available	Marketing Withdrawn	Service Discontinued
5765-AEZ	06.01.01	2010/02/09	2010/03/05	2016/04/05	-
5765-AEZ	06.01.00	2008/09/02	2008/09/12	2016/04/05	2017/04/30

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Program number

• AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1.1 (5765-AEZ)
• AIX Enterprise Edition 1 year SWMA (5771-AEZ)
• AIX Enterprise Edition 3 year SWMA (5773-AEZ)
• AIX Enterprise Edition ALC (5771-ALZ)

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Abstract

IBM AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1.1

AIX Enterprise Edition has been enhanced to include the Systems Director Enterprise Edition as a component of AIX Enterprise Edition. The AIX 6 operating system is available in two different editions: A Standard Edition that includes only the AIX operating system, expansion pack, and other commonly used software such as an Internet browser, and an Enterprise Edition that includes all the features of the Standard Edition and additional management software designed to complement the features of AIX 6.

AIX Enterprise Edition is a single offering that includes AIX 6 and several key manageability products that are designed to:

• Improve availability
• Enhance operational efficiency
• Measure resource usage in a virtualized environment

AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1.1 includes:

• AIX Standard Edition Version 6 at Technology Level 4
• IBM PowerVM Workload Partitions Manager V2.1
• IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition

AIX Enterprise Edition is designed to provide the following benefits:

• Improved service availability through access to relevant, real-time information about IT resources and through Live Application Mobility

• Enhanced operational efficiency though visualization of the relationships of IT resources and applications

• Improved operational efficiency by centralizing monitoring and automating the response to service issues

• Improved customer satisfaction by providing accurate information of the IT resources used to support business workloads

• Better utilization of IT resources through consolidated views of virtualized resource usage

• Simplified ordering of AIX and essential service management tools at an attractive price

The inclusion of Systems Director Enterprise Edition as part of the AIX Enterprise Edition brings significant new platform management capabilities compared to previous releases of AIX Enterprise Edition. Existing AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1 customers will be able to upgrade to AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1.1 at no additional charge.

IBM AIX Enterprise Edition V6.1

The AIX Enterprise Edition is an IBM offering that includes AIX 6 and several key manageability products. AIX Enterprise Edition consists of the AIX 6 operating system, the PowerVM Workload Partitions Manager for AIX (WPAR Manager), and three Tivoli products: Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM), IBM Tivoli Monitoring, and the IBM Usage and Accounting Manager Virtualization Edition for Power Systems. This offering delivers significant manageability capabilities beyond the capabilities of the standard AIX 6.1 product (AIX Standard Edition).

Applications from earlier AIX releases or from AIX Standard Edition:

Applications created on previous versions of AIX 5 or AIX Standard Edition should run on AIX Enterprise Edition 6.1 without recompilation as long as those programs do not use nonportable programming techniques.

Additional information on binary compatibility can be found at

http://www.ibm.com/servers/aix/os/compatibility/

In addition to the AIX 6 OS, AIX Enterprise Edition includes enterprise management functionality provided by the PowerVM Workload Partitions Manager for AIX (WPAR Manager), Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM), IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), and IBM Usage and Accounting Manager Virtualization Edition (UAM). Together, these enterprise management tools enable you to manage your Power System AIX environment more efficiently and effectively.

These tools are designed to:

• Improve availability through access to relevant real-time information

• Enhance operational efficiency through visualization of resources and centralized management of virtualized AIX environments

• Provide accurate assessment of system resource usage

Key features provided by AIX Enterprise Edition enable you to:

• Relocate Workload Partitions (WPARs) between systems using Live Application Mobility

• Manage WPARs across multiple systems -- centralize the creation, replication, and starting of WPARs across multiple systems

• Automatically discover IT components and their relationships -- ideal for managing dynamic virtualized environments

• Monitor virtualized resources -- efficient management begins with comprehensive performance information

• Visually represent components -- assists understanding of complex application dependencies

• Monitor utilization and configuration changes -- useful for problem determination and failure analysis

• Collect and report resource usage -- understand IT resource consumption by workload or area

AIX Enterprise Edition brings all of this functionality under a single offering designed to simplify ordering and to provide value not available when ordering the individual products separately.
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Product positioning

AIX Enterprise Edition should be considered for any client that is considering AIX 6 and that needs to get the most out of their Power Systems AIX Environment. AIX Enterprise Edition will be offered as an upgrade from AIX Standard Edition.
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Highlights

The AIX operating system has been enhanced to provide the following capabilities in AIX 6 Technology Level 9:

• Hardware support: Support and exploitation for the POWER7+ processor-based systems that provide better performance, better scalability, and better resiliency.

• AIX Enterprise Edition will now include the PowerVC offering. PowerVC improves enterprise virtualization management, reduces capital expense and power consumption, and increases agility and execution to respond to changing business requirements.

• Enhanced live system backup support provides a consistent backup even in the presence of a workload that is creating and deleting temporary files.

• Enhanced LDAP support with users and groups:
  • A local system-defined user can be a member of an LDAP-based group.
  • An LDAP-based user can be a member of a local system-defined group.

• Improved AIX WPAR update management (AIX 7.1 only) can roll back to a previous version of the WPAR.

• Enhanced AIX versioned WPAR lifecycle management (AIX 7.1 only) allows existing AIX 5.2 or AIX 5.3 version WPARs to be upgraded to AIX 7 WPARs.

• Display of current ODM attribute settings: The lsattr P option to display applied attributes that may not yet be in effect on the running system.

• Enhanced to provide link status reporting for virtual Ethernet adapter. Enablement is required in virtual Ethernet adapter to receive link status notification. VIOS 2.2.3.0 is a prerequisite for this capability.

• Added a memory allocator function (AIX 7.1 only) that adapts to multi-threaded application usage. The allocator improves application scaling without requiring extensive tuning.

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Description

The AIX operating system has been enhanced to provide the following new capabilities in AIX 6 Technology Level 7:

Performance and scalability:

• A new (network option), namely tcp_fastlo, for enabling a TCP fast loopback feature. Using the TCP fast loopback feature can significantly reduce TCP/IP protocol overhead and lower CPU utilization if the two (TCP) communication endpoints reside on the same logical partition (LPAR).

• Improved application availability when using Live Application Mobility to relocate a rootvg-based workload partition (WPAR) from one system to another.

• An enhancement to the JFS2 filesystem that allows administrators to dynamically alter filesystem caching to tune the performance of certain workloads such as sequential reads or sequential writes without the disruption of unmounting the filesystem.

Availability:

• A new option for the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to retry failed I/O operations indefinitely. This can improve overall system availability by allowing recovery from transient failures of storage devices.

Security:

• AIX support for multiple Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers to provide increased availability and load balancing.

• Auditing subsystem support for audit events for the Encrypting Filesystem and Role Based Access Control Domains.

• Additional support to centralize management of Role Based Access Control Domains in LDAP.

• GSSAPI support for IPSec to provide increased cross-platform interoperability.

Manageability:

• AIX Profile Manager application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and clients to provide control of resources outside of AIX.

• Significant improvement in mksysb performance during restore and alt_disk_install operations.

• ProbeVue enhancements including support for regular expressions in user function probes, a new stack trace data type, and support for printing the process tree and listing probe points.

Other enhancements:

• An update of Samba on the AIX Expansion Pack to version 3.3.12.

AIX Enterprise Edition provides the following functionality in addition to the functionality delivered with the AIX 6 operating system (included in AIX Enterprise Edition):

• Discovers multiple kinds of IT components, including servers, LPARs, Virtual I/O server, AIX, and WPARs

• Monitors performance and availability for IT components

• Monitors the health and availability of Power Systems, providing rich graphical views of the AIX, logical partition (LPAR), WPARs, central electronics complex, Hardware Management Console, and Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) resources

• Provides complete visibility into Power Systems configurations and application complexity by automatically creating and maintaining application infrastructure maps

• Creates, deletes, clones, stops, starts and modifies WPARs on multiple systems from a centralized management console

• Allows WPARs to be relocated between servers using AIX Live Application Mobility

• Understands the usage of shared IT resources and runs trends and problem determination reports

• Tracks system utilization

AIX Enterprise Edition is designed to address these pain points:

• Monitor the Power Systems platform when virtualization technologies are being implemented.

• Manage the Power Systems platform implementation using diverse tools and consoles.

• Gain a clear, whole view of interdependencies between applications, servers, and network devices.

• Link IT expenditures to business value.

• Monitor inaccurate cost allocation across functions and departments, particularly from shared, consolidated, or virtualized resources.

• Ensure configuration compliance.

• Monitor changes to Power Systems environment.

• Monitoring capabilities:

  • Improved availability through access to relevant real-time information that allows effective problem identification, root cause analysis, recovery, and automation of recovery with the known fixes

  • Enhanced operations efficiency through integrated and targeted visualization of resources, reduced TCO through out-of-the-box monitors, reports, prepackaged expert knowledge, and a user-friendly GUI that minimizes training costs and ongoing administrative efforts

  • Continuous IT services improvement with granular historical data to assist in capacity planning, SLA reporting, and predictive problem trending analysis

• Through discovery capabilities, improved understanding of the system configurations and relationships to applications and business services, including:

  • Hardware Management Console (HMC)

  • VIOS

  • Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM)

  • Power Systems servers managed by the HMC

  • LPARs configured on each Power Systems server

  • Automatic discovery of AIX 6.1 and AIX 5.3 operating systems

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Operating environment

Hardware requirements

• IBM systems that run on the POWER5, or POWER6 processors, including the IBM Power Systems, System p, System i, System p5, IBM eServer p5, and IBM eServer pSeries server product lines.

Software requirements

Systems operating on AIX 6.1 are supported only when used within the system operating environments described in the appropriate hardware announcements and when used within the specified operating environment. When systems operating on AIX 6.1 are used with other software or software in later announcements, other limitations may be included.
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Planning information

Customer responsibilities

The customer is responsible for evaluation, selection, and implementation of security features, administrative procedures, and appropriate controls in application systems and communication facilities.
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Publications

No publications are shipped with this program.
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Security, auditability, and control

AIX 6.1 uses the system and network security features for security and auditability. These features are:

• System security:
  • Role Based Access Control
  • Trusted AIX: Multi-level security
  • AIX Security Expert
  • Trusted Execution
  • Native Kerberos V5 KDC Server/Client Support
  • Trusted Computing Base available as an optional preinstall feature
  • AIX LDAP Security Audit plug-in
  • Pluggable Authentication Mechanism
  • IBM SecureWay Directory Version 3.2.1

• Network security:
  • PKCS support
  • IP Key Encryption Security
  • Directory-based resolvers

AIX 6.1 introduces new security extensions to FTP based on RFC 4217. These extensions provide data and control channel integrity by means of the TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security and Secure Socket Layer) protocols.

AIX Enterprise Edition augments these capabilities by providing automatic detection of server configuration changes and by providing monitoring of system alert conditions.

Trademarks

(R), (TM), * Trademark or registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.

** Company, product, or service name may be a trademark or service mark of others.

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.
 © IBM Corporation 2015.
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