So we loaded all 7 CDROMs on to our VIOS to add them to the virtual Optical Library. Second, we booted from the CDROM only to with an immediate halt with a warning the AIX 5.2 can't run in a Shared CPU LPAR - doh! we should have realised that one. It was a quite spectacular halt too! So we shut a few LPARs down to release a whole CPU and tried again. Now we were told the Virtual Optical would boot (as the firmware understand virtual optical) but we could not install as AIX 5.2 doesn't understand the virtual optical devices for installing. Next we went back to the CDROM drive method and found that it could not work with VIOS supported disks - only dedicated adapters. And we did not have a spare adapter with disks as we put them all in VIOS these days to share them across LPARs for flexibility.

AIX 5.2 it seems only works with dedicated CPU, physical CDC, dedicated disk adapters and dedicated network adapters.

We suddenly remembered how for we have come since AIX 5.2 (October 2002) and how easy it is to forget how flexible and shared we are these days - that's the power virtualisation with PowerVM. In the end, we plugged in a old small POWER5 machine, trashed all the LPARs and ran it as a one AIX 5.2 for the whole machine and installed via NIM.  What we thought would be 20 minutes work took the best part of a day as we slowly recalled the limitation.  Oh well, we have the AIX 5.2 mksysb ready now and it installed in to a Versioned WPAR on AIX7 in minutes - it worked first time. I then ran my nmon for AIX 5.2 - that worked first time too. This is cool stuff and it can see all four of the SMT on the POWER7 processor.

• AIX Active Memory Expansion AME
• LPAR Active Memory Sharing AMS
• Live Partition Mobility LPM
• Live Kernel Update LKU
• PowerVC
• PowerSC
• PowerVM
  • Power Hypervisor for Logical Paritions - now called Virtual Machines
  • Virtual I/O Server (VOIS) for virtual disks plus NPIV
  • VIOS for virtual optical devices for installing
  • VIOS for virtual networks plus VNIC etc
  • VIOS Shared Storage Pools
• Sharing resources across AIX, Linux and IBM i
• nmon for AIX was pretty new and not part of AIX itself (that happened in 2007) 
• njmon for modern tooling to grab AIX many hundreds of statisitic from the AIX libperf library and ave them to InfluxDB and graph them with Grafana  :-)