AIX Editions
AIX 7.3 TL3 announcement
- IBM AIX 7.3 Standard Edition
- IBM AIX 7.3 Entreprise Edition
- IBM AIX 7.3 Cloud Edition
The big feature for AIX V7.2 allows concurrent patching of the entire AIX kernel on the fly—with no interruption to applications. Initially this capability will only be supported for Interim Fixes but it is the foundation for broader concurrent patching in the future.
Other capabilities of AIX 7.2 include:
Server Based Flash Caching – Transparently use flash drives to cache I/O. Support for POWER7 and later processor-based systems Http protocol support in NIM Openssh added to base operating system installation menus Dynamic System Optimizer included in AIX 7.2 base bos.net.tcp.client repackaged into bos.net.tcp.client.core, bos.net.ftp, and bos.net.snmp New LVM mirroring policy to exploit flash drives for fast reads There is also a new Technology Level for AIX 7.1, Technology Level 4, which includes a few of the AIX 7.2 enhancements (but not concurrent patching). And in case you missed it, the support life for AIX 7.1 Technology Level 3 was extended last April to 2017.
The content for each of these products is similar, except that the AIX 7.2 Enterprise Edition does not include Dynamic System Optimizer (DSO) because DSO is already included in the AIX 7.2 Standard Edition.
In addition to the appropriate level of AIX, the new Enterprise Editions include:
- PowerVC
- PowerSC Standard Edition
- AIX Dynamic System Optimizer (for AIX 7.1 EE only)
- Cloud Manager with OpenStack for Power
- IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.3
- IBM BigFix Lifecycle
IBM AIX 7.3 Standard Edition
AIX 7.3 Standard Edition
AIX 7.3 is enhanced to help clients achieve better performance in several key areas.
Respond faster to business demands
Adds python version 3.9.6. The new command to invoke python is /usr/bin/python3. The python shipped in AIX 7.3 works with Ansible® solutions. Extends the scalability of AIX, supporting a maximum of 240 cores (1920 hardware threads) in a single Power10 logical partition (LPAR). JFS2 filesystem size and file size limits are increased beyond 32 TB and 16 TB, respectively. See the AIX 7.3 release notes for the new supported limits. Supports the use of the on-chip NX GZIP accelerator in Power9 and Power10 servers. The pigz (parallel gzip) open source command and the AIX zlibNX library are included in the AIX 7.3 default installation. Both the pigz command and the zlibNX library transparently use the NX GZIP compression accelerator. Provides up to twice the Asynchronous IO (AIO) on Peripheral Component Interconnect® Express (PCIe) nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) scaling capabilities. The create_ova command now uses Power HW GZIP compression acceleration to speed up Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) creation and transfers on Power9 and Power10. TCP protocol stack now supports CUBIC congestion algorithm, providing improved network performance in high-latency environments. Includes a new command mksysb_iso to enable the creation a single bootable ISO image larger than 4 GB. Adds bash version 5.1.4 that is ported from open source bash and provides similar functionality. This is another shell supported on AIX, along with existing shells ksh, ksh93, csh, and bsh. Maximize availability and reliability
Reduces the amount of time required to dynamically add processor and memory resources to a running LPAR. Reduces initial program load (IPL) times for multiterabyte memory LPARs. Live kernel update supports the changing of select boot time parameters without requiring a reboot. Adds support for virtual Persistent Memory (vPMEM), where each vPMEM device is configured as an hdisk. A vPMEM hdisk has better potential performance than local NVMe disks. The contents of a vPMEM hdisk are preserved on an LPAR reboot, provided the server is not rebooted. These AIX vPMEM hdisks can be applied for the following uses: Raw disk I/O access Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Journaled File System (JFS2) support Paging device Flash caching device Provides Geographical Logical Volume Manager (GLVM) enhancements, such as: Support for freeze and resume of I/Os on secondary site. This enables you to perform storage-based backup functions, such as disk snapshots. Support of multiple network sessions to better handle large network latencies between sites. Adds the following Server Block Message (SMB) 3.0 features: Case-insensitive file/directory name support Unicode UTF-8 support System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) support and automating /etc/filesystems update SMB 3.0.2 support for Live Kernel Update (LKU) Protect data from core to cloud
Adds IP Security (IPsec) enhancements as follows: IPSec support for IKE fragmentation with Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) IPsec support for Network Address Translation-Traversal (NAT-T) with IKEv2 Provides enhanced support for logical volume (LV) encryption to include encryption for LV support in rootvg and dump device. Sendmail includes support for Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL). Trace facility use is now limited by default to the root user. Uses SHA256 as the new default password algorithm with support for up to 255-character passwords. Uses more secure default password policy. In support of creating stronger security policies, several AIX networking filesets, such as bos.net.tcp.ftp and bos.net.tcp.telnet, are no longer installed by default. Includes support for the new PCIe3 Cryptographic Coprocessor Gen3 4769. OpenSSL 1.1.1j is available for download on the AIX web download site. Includes AIX Network Install Manager (NIM), adding the additional NFSv4 option (nfs_vers) to provide a convenient way for accessing NIM resources.This enables users to specify the NFS protocol version required for clients to access the export location of a NIM resource during operation. Network Time Protocol (NTP) version 4 is included as a part of base AIX installation. Streamline insights and automation
AIX 7.3 provides the capability to leverage Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) instructions through support of Power10 processor compatibility mode. IBM Open XL C/C++ for AIX is a standards-based high-performance compiler that facilitates the creation and maintenance of applications written in C and C++ for IBM Power solutions. It generates code that can take advantage of the capabilities of the latest Power10 architecture and optimize your hardware utilization. A number of new built-in functions are delivered in this release to unlock Power10 architecture MMA instructions. For more information, see Software Announcement 221-321, dated September 8, 2021. IBM Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) 7.1 on AIX 7.3 supports MMA AI Accelerator instructions for BLAS1, BLAS2, BLAS3, and several LAPACK routines. For more information, see Software Announcement 221-221, dated September 8, 2021. Several open source packages, such as numpy, have been tested on AIX and can be used for AI use cases, which enables inferencing at the point of data Applications on AIX can callout to Red Hat® Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Red Hat OpenShift® “side-cars” to leverage MMA-accelerated AI capability for inferencing RHEL or OpenShift “side-cars” for Enterprise AI can also use relational databases on AIX to feed models or store predictions from inferencing IBM Lab Services offerings are available that provide capabilities to leverage Enterprise AI use cases on AIX 7.3. (For more information, consult your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner.) Other enhancements
ksh93u+2012-08-01 available as a tech preview Updates libpcap to version 1.9.1 Improved globalization enablement to support additional national characters in different languages and locales: Ships the latest ICU4C (open source) library. The new feature enables AIX independent software vendors (ISV) and clients to easily port their non-AIX applications to AIX platforms. Supports Unicode 13.0. The new feature enables AIX libc APIs to support 143,859 characters for a total of 154 scripts. Rebuilt all 172 Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) locales. The new feature enables users to easily get the same locale environment on other platforms.
