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Why upgrade from AIX 7.1 to AIX 7.2?

How To


Summary

AIX 7.1 is getting a little old. Here are the main reasons to upgrade to AIX 7.2.
Written Q1 2021 - there can be even more reasons later.

Objective

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Environment

You are running AIX 7.1.
No sensible technical person would be running anything older than AIX 7.1 now, due to:
  1. Lack of support or support comes at a high price with Service Extensions.
  2. Lack of security updates.
  3. Missing advanced functions and advanced features that are only found in later AIX releases, particularly AIX 7.2.
  4. Not making full use of POWER8 and POWER9 servers. For example, AIX 6.1 supports SMT=1,2 and 4 (no SMT=8!).
  5. Missing years of development into removing serialisation on locks and latches, adding parallel execution, shortening path lengths (fewer cycles used to get work done), better performance tuning options, better out-of-box performance settings, and field hardening like trace and diagnostics.
  6. Putting these reasons all together: older AIX versions run slower.

Steps

Reason 1: AIX 7.2 has a great logo
I could get told off for this comment.  There only three IBM official logos and they are the IBM eight bar gate, the Watson logo, and the IBM Cloud logo.  Everything that you might think are logos but are icons.  So now you know.
 image 7978
The IBM top web page for AIX is: AIX TOP WEB PAGE with dozens of link to all the main topics.
Reason 2: AIX 7.1 is getting old
AIX 7.1 released 2010 - Amazing, that it is so many years ago.
  • AIX 7.1 TL5 last significant update in 2017
  • Functionally stabilised since then – fixes only
  • All AIX 7.1 users should only be on Technology Level 5 with Service Pack 7
  • AIX 7.1 TL4 or earlier are not full supported - by which I mean users can have to upgrade to TL5 to get an efix
  • AIX 7.1 support fee-based Service Extension starts probably in late 2021 or 2022 (use this version as a temporary stop stopgap
  • Last planned service pack Q4 2021 (9 months) 
AIX 7.2 released 2015
  • All new features since are AIX 7.2 only - OK, a couple of items got back ported to AIX 7.1 but it is a short list.
  • The upgrade process AIX 7.1 to AIX 7.2 is clear and understood
  • IBM Power Lab Services available to assist & experienced
Reason 3: There is lots of new technology only found in AIX 7.2 
One excellent place to have the new technology lists if the IBM Redbooks.
I found most of them listed in this Redbook with description details and hands-on hints and tips.
AIX Enhancements and Modernization RedBook with approximately 200 pages of content and revised in 2020.
The Redbook is available for download from:   HERE
image 7983
The contents of the Redbook are listed here and I highlighted the parts, which are covering AIX 7.2 specific features. Read the Redbook for more information:
Chapter 1. General enhancements
  • 1.1 Live Update function
  • 1.2 Server Flash Caching
  • 1.3 Multipath I/O
  • 1.4 iSCSI software initiator
  • 1.5 Network Installation Manager Enhancements
  • 1.6 Logical Volume Manager (reclaim)
  • 1.7 JFS2 (reclaim)
  • 1.8 Multiple alternative disk clones
  • 1.9 Active Memory Expansion (64KB)
  • 1.10 The nmon tool and current processor frequency reporting
  • 1.11 Globalization
  • 1.12 AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications (many tools at AIX 7.2 only)
Chapter 2. Security enhancements
  • 2.1 AIX Trusted Execution
  • 2.2 AIX Secure boot
  • 2.3 AIX Trusted installation and update
  • 2.4 Multifactor authentication
  • 2.5 Cryptographic libraries
  • 2.6 Address space layout randomization
  • 2.7 Trusted shared library area support 
Chapter 3. Networking enhancements
  • 3.1 Redundant link aggregation network interface backup
  • 3.2 Shared memory communication over Remote Direct Memory Access
Chapter 4. Virtualization and cloud capabilities
  • 4.1 AIX on public cloud
  • 4.2 IBM Power Virtualization Center
  • 4.3 IBM Cloud Automation Manager - Teraform
  • 4.4 Ansible automation and AIX
  • 4.5 Chef Infra client on AIX
  • 4.6 Puppet Enterprise on AIX
Chapter 5. IBM AIX and IBM PowerVM features
  • 5.1 Storage access
  • 5.2 Network access.
  • 5.3 Dynamic LPAR support
  • 5.4 Virtual processors
  • 5.5 Simultaneous multi-threading and logical processors
  • 5.6 Active System Optimizer and Dynamic System Optimizer
  • 5.7 Shared storage pools
  • 5.8 PowerVM NovaLink
  • 5.9 Power Enterprise Pools
  • 5.10 Linux on Power
  • 5.11 Virtual I/O Server enhancements
Chapter 6. Disaster recovery and high availability
  • 6.1 IBM VM Recovery Manager for Power Systems
  • 6.2 PowerHA
Chapter 7. IBM AIX fundamentals
  • 7.1 Logical Volume Manager
  • 7.2 AIX Enhanced Journaled File System
  • 7.3 Role-based access control
  • 7.4 Encrypted File System
  • 7.5 AIX Security Expert and IBM PowerSC integration.
  • 7.6 The AIX Auditing subsystem and Autonomic Health Advisor File System
  • 7.7 MultiBOS
Items in red are significant AIX7.2 only features or enhancements only in AIX 7.2.  One feature missing is XIVE as it arrived after the Redbook was updated.
Reason 4: My Person Hotlist of Items
My favourite AIX 7.2 only highlights:
  1. Faster than AIX 7.1
  2. Better Multipath I/O 
  3. Live Update of AIX with zero reboots even across Technology Level upgrades
  4. Active Memory Expansion 64KB - extra memory for low low prices
  5. AIX Open Source Toolbox (Goland/Go, helm, Kubectl, Kubelet + auditbeat, filebeat, metricbeat, Calico, and more)
  6. LVM + JFS2 enhancements particularly space reclaiming
  7. On POWER9 gzip hardware acceleration enablement
  8. On POWER9 XIVE for fast interrupts using lower number of CPU cycles
  9. There are nmon improvements too.
Reason 5: highlights of improvements in the last Technology Level (AIX 7.2 TL5 - Nov 2020)
In AIX 7.2 and the most recent Technology Level 5 available from Q4 2020 has the following improvement areas:
New Adapter Support
  • PCIe4 Flash Adapter x8
  • EN7A, EN7B, EN7C, EN7D, EN7E, EN7F
  • PCIe3 2-port 16Gb FC Adapter EN2A, EN2B
  • PCIe2 2-Port USB 3.0 Adapter EC6K, EC6J
AIX Live Update (previously LKM the K was dropped as a lot more that the Kernel is updated)
  • Spectrum® Protect 
  • Oracle ASM
  • Veritas InfoScale 
  • SAP Best Practice + SAP note 2977742
Security
  • LV Encryption
  • IPSec IKEv2 & improved performance
  • RSCT Trusted Execution
Performance
  • FC NPIV multi-queue?
  • FC-NVMe on 32 Gbps on EN1A or EN1B
  • NVMe space Reclaim rmlv, rmlvcopy chfs
  • FC 16GB+ switch congestion pathing
  • vSCSI timeout control multiple values
Modernization
  • Certified Open Group UNIX V7
  • "create_ova" VM image for PowerVC
  • Cisco Discovery Protocol
  • Internationalization improvements
  • Update Tcl/Tk 8.6.10
  • RPM command 4.15.1.0 & dependencies
  • API for poolset
Filesystems
  • SMB version 3.0.2 client protocol support
  • Geographic Logical Manager (GLVM)
  •     - compression, monitoring & stats
  • JFS2 = 14 milloion open files / SRAD
Ansible
  •  Supported from Red Hat
    • AIX content in Ansible Hub for AIX
  •  Open source from the AIX Toolbox
    • AIX content in Ansible Galaxy
AIX Toolbox - New + Updates
  • auditbeat, aix-x11-pc, bash-completion, cmake, cmocka, community-mysql, filebeat, ganglia - 8 modules for AIX
  • . . .  Golang (Go), lftp, mariadb, metricbeat, nagios, p7zip, pigz, protobuf, pv, lutok, tripwire
  • - Updated 113 packages is last 6 months
  • - New Python3 40 packages
  • - Python2 is depreciated
AIX Enterprise Edition 1.4 update with VM Recovery Manager HA 1.5
Thanks to the following people for a lot of this information
  • Maria Ward AIX Offering Manager & 
  • Carl Burnett AIX Development Manager
     

Additional Information

Content from Nigel Griffiths IBM (retired) can be found here:

Document Location

Worldwide

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Document Information

Modified date:
09 June 2023

UID

ibm16408608

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