Consolidate AIX 5.2 Workloads

The new offering from IBM that enables you to run AIX 5.2 in a WPAR is called a Versioned WPAR. When you create a Versioned WPAR with the mkwpar command, each WPAR has an isolated network environment with a unique IP addresses and host name, just like the WPARs we’re used to today. You can access your WPARs through standard networking programs like telnet, FTP and rlogin.

An AIX 5.2 WPAR is intended to help minimize the effort needed to consolidate old environments onto new, more efficient hardware. For shops that still run legacy hardware and AIX 5.2, this WPAR capability will allow you to stay on AIX 5.2 while moving up to POWER7, with the added advantage of retiring your old hardware. All you'll need to do is back up an existing AIX 5.2 environment using mksysb and restore it inside of an AIX 7 WPAR.

I was excited to work with this new capability. Besides wanting to test this functionality just for the sake of testing it, I actually had a customer who was having performance issues on AIX 5.2 servers running on old hardware right around the time of this announcement. We decided to try a proof of concept, as I already had the AIX 7 open beta running on a POWER6 processor-based system. IBM POWER7 processor-based hardware supports the Versioned WPAR offering, but you also can get it to work on POWER6 processor-based hardware if you want to test it out.

The first command that I tried (mkwpar -n testwpar -C -B /mymksysb/testsystem) failed because I didn’t have enough available disk space in rootvg on my global LPAR. I retried it with: mkwpar -n testwpar -L shrink=yes -C -B /mymksysb/testsystem and I saw another error:

mkwpar: 0960-396 Failed to populate workload partition testwpar.