I am just starting to explore virtualization for an AIX 5.3 server and
have several questions as follows:

1) Can it be done?

2) If it can be done, can I create a vitual image that runs on a
windows OS or do I need to run it
on AIX?

3) Again, if it can be done, what are the steps to doing it?

Any help is appreciated.

rsine wrote:
>
> I am just starting to explore virtualization for an AIX 5.3 server and
> have several questions as follows:

Pardon my jumping in here, but these questions seem environment related and not
specific to AIX. I'll be an AIX guy by this time 18 months from now, but as you
can see from my .sig, my current expertise is on another o.s.

> 1) Can it be done?

Ever heard of "LPARs"? (Logical partitions; on Alpha machines under VMS, this
was called "Galaxy", both hard- and soft-partitions. It was possible to run an
entire VMS cluster on multiple partitions within a single machine (within a
single "Galaxy").)

> 2) If it can be done, can I create a vitual image that runs on a
> windows OS or do I need to run it
> on AIX?

I assume you understand that running a non-x86 o.s. under Windows-x86 requires a
program known as a CPU emulator. In this case, you'd need one that emulates some
compatible flavor of Power CPU.

I'm aware of VAX, Alpha and PDP-11 CPU emulators for Windows(Charon-VAX,
Charon-Alpha and SIMH, respectively). Nothing emulating Power has yet come to my
attention, though such may exist.

Ideally, of course, you'd want a "hardware emulation layer" to live between the
x86 CPU(s) and AIX without an intervening o.s. so as to avoid the security and
stability issues inherent in Windows.

> 3) Again, if it can be done, what are the steps to doing it?
>
> Any help is appreciated.

Do you have access to any formal support channels through IBM?

--
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http://www.djesys.com/

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On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:20:54 -0700, rsine wrote:

> I am just starting to explore virtualization for an AIX 5.3 server and
> have several questions as follows:
>
> 1) Can it be done?
>
> 2) If it can be done, can I create a vitual image that runs on a
> windows OS or do I need to run it
> on AIX?
>
> 3) Again, if it can be done, what are the steps to doing it?
>
> Any help is appreciated.

1) Absolutely, and the number of permutations is litterally staggering.
You can virtualize CPU, memory, disk, CD-ROM, and Ethernet resources at
the very least, and you can move most of those things around at run-time.
You can also use supported APIs in C and Java to detect when things are
moving (and stop them if you want to ;-)...

2) I've heard a few whispers, but I'd bet on no. AIX hasn't run on
anything but IBM's POWER and PowerPC hardware since the early 90s. IBM's
virtualization schemes are very much tied to the p5 (and soon p6) hardware
and the moderately buried "hypervisor" layer that controls it all.

3) The other poster is right. Unless you want to try running AIX/PS2
from almost 2 decades ago, you'd have to do serious hardware emulation to
come up with anything that looked like p5 hardware on a PC...

I heard some rumors that PowerMac hardware was a superset of the IBM CHRP
(Common Hardware Reference Platform ?) specification and would run AIX,
but I've never had the hardware to test it. There are a few things buried
in various system header files that reference the IA architecture as well
as the Motorola G4 (I'm pretty sure), but that's far from complete support...

-Chris

In article <1175944854.328266.13780@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups. com>,
rsine <rsine@stationeryhouse.com> wrote:
>I am just starting to explore virtualization for an AIX 5.3 server and
>have several questions as follows:
>
>1) Can it be done?

Yes - depends on your hardware, though

>2) If it can be done, can I create a vitual image that runs on a
>windows OS or do I need to run it
> on AIX?

Err... ? Your question is unclear. Are you asking if you can run AIX on
x86 hardware? Are you asking if you can run Windows guests (or other x86
OSes) within an AIX-hosted VM environment? Either way, I believe the
answer is no. With the p5 virtualization, I believe you can only run
AIX and Linux for power series systems.

>3) Again, if it can be done, what are the steps to doing it?

Heh... That's going to be waaaay beyond the scope of a usenet response.
At the grossest level, virtualization is going to be done much the way
it's done in other virtualization environments: i.e., you have a hypervisor
that manages the underlying hardware resources and presents them in
logical groupings suitable for hosting an OS (that runs on that class of
hardware).

-tom

--

"You can only be -so- accurate with a claw-hammer." --me