Can anyone out there let me know what is the *common* Technology Level and Service Pack that everyone is at?
I am at
5300-06-04-0748 on all of my LPARs.
Also- does anyone have any guidelinies to rolling out new TL and Sps?
Thanks
5300-08-02-0822
The TL roadmap is typically not available on the public internet and can usually be found in IBM powerpoint presentations.
Probably there is no such thing as a "common" TL. Some sites will lag behind because they like their stable running environment, at some (few) sites they will install every new TL/SP at the moment when it becomes available and most others will be somewhere in between....
As long as you don't experience any problems or lack new features because of the oslevel and as long as you can open a PMR without being forced by IBM to upgrade you should be fine. To find out whether IBM thinks that you are using an acceptable (i.e. supported) combination of hard and software you could check with the IBM - Fix Level Recommendation Tool
First off: a good strategy is to update when you must, not, when you can!
Having said this: version management is oftenly driven by the applications: some require a certain version down to the fix level and the only thing you can do is to have exactly this version - even if the request is outright silly one usually can't argue with product support.*) So,if you have a larger environment you probably have all sorts of AIX versions running on different systems.
5.3 is a very mature and stable AIX version. I would - nowadays - recommend ML08, but when this came out in summer the update process from ML06 was so buggy we had to manually install ML07 first, then manually (fileset by fileset) update to ML08 and still had all sorts of issues on the test system. This just to illustrate what i have said before.
On the other hand, one customer of mine has already several 6.1 systems out and running. They froze 5.x at 5.2ML5 and did never update to 5.3 at all. They move their machines now to 6.1 at once. Nevertheless they have a few systems with different versions because of said application requirements. These systems range from 4.3.3ML11 up to 5.3ML06.
The best way to deal with the increasing number of different versions is to build and nurture a sound installation base in form of a NIM server, IMHO. Nag your management until they give you the resources for one.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
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*) the same is true for other machine specifics: for instance, SAP decrees "twice the amount of real memory" in swap space to be necessary. If you have a problem, whatever it might be, they will force you to first meet this "requirement" before they even consider your problem. That the machine might have swapped not a single page out in a year is no argument at all for them. Ridiculous, but inevitable.
The roadmap is available on a public site. The roadmap is presented when you download fixpacks from Fix Central at IBM Support: Fix Central
Select your version and a fixtype of Fixpack and you get to see the roadmap on the same page where you select the download.
For example, AIX 6.1 roadmap is at: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/genunix3/61_current.jpg
AIX 5.3 roadmap is at: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/genunix3/53_current.jpg
