Earlier this year IBM announced that AIX is supported on the Nutanix platform. This is in addition to the 2017 announcement of PowerLinux being initially supported.
What does this mean if you are a customer, particularly in finance? You finally have a web-scale platform that you can use to consolidate all of your legacy and cloud-native applications onto. Those vertically-scaled mission critical applications running on AIX and PowerLinux finally have a modern platform that aligns with your x86 workloads. Strategically, this makes the Nutanix platform a great choice if you need a stepping stone for non-x86 to x86 application refactoring (assuming your applications fit on the scale-out POWER8 CS hardware and do not require the POWER8 E8XX big iron).
Requirements of the solution:
- You need IBM POWER8 technology-based CS821 and CS822 nodes.
- Running Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.2.1.1 and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) 20170331.78.
- For AIX 7.2 with the 7200-02 Technology Level with Service Pack 7200-02-02-1810 and APAR IJ05283, or later.
- For PowerLinux, SLES 11 or 12, Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04, CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 are supported.
Some caveats and additional information:
- LPARs, VIO Server and HMC are no longer required and are replaced by AHV, Prism and IPMI as the management and virtualization platform.
- Nutanix X-Ray 2.3 and above supports the IBM CS platform as test targets for scenario-centric performance testing.
- Need to ensure app/DB binaries are ported to ppc64le (PowerLinux) and ppc64be (AIX) to run on the IBM CS platform with AHV.
- NIM/mksysb are supported.
- Data can be migrated using similar techniques available to the Nutanix x86 platform.
- Intel CPUs have 2 threads per core, IBM POWER8 CPUs have 8 threads per core.
- AHV schedules threads for x86 and cores for POWER8.
- POWER8 processors excel at computationally intensive workloads, in particular high throughput databases and congnitive/AI workloads.
- Purchases are transacted through IBM channel partners or IBM Power Systems server sales.
- You contact IBM for support.
- Implementation services via IBM Lab Services.
- Nutanix sales teams can assist customers with the sales process.
Additional Resources
vcdx133.com 