How do you keep your AIX skills up to date?

I am very curious to find out how AIX admins keep up to date and refreshed with all of the options and features of AIX without having access to a test environment?
Usually going on a course requires practice otherwise the knowledge gained can get lost very quickly.
How do you practice for the required certifications and keep your skills current?

That (the fact that IBM has no AIX system at a price affordable for a singular person) is perhaps the most unwise (to avoid a stronger term) decision IBM ever has come up with and probably will - in the long run - be the undoing of AIX.

Sun Microsystems, for a long time, showered universities with lots of hardware at minimal prices (if not free of cost at all: "You want to buy some E4500? Great, we give you some good rebate and chip in 5 U05 for free.") and that served to educate the physicists, chemists, etc. in SunOS/Solaris. Most of the physicists don't work in physics but end up doing software engineering or systems administration and when these were asked which UNIX platform to select for a project - guess, which one they chose.

IBM, on the other hand, never had anything comparable to a U05 in the last ten years. If you want some equipment for playing around with Linux virtualisation you buy some better-than-average PC for, say, $ 1000 and start playing around. If you want some playground for AIX virtualisation you buy a HMC, a 822, a few licenses and you are conveniently set back some $50k. I, for my part, can't afford that.

All that leads to a severe lack of new blood. The average IBM shop has admins in my age range on average - and i am 55. We are the new MVS admins - another species rapidly being taken care of by biology.

So, to answer your question: i always make it a point that customers have some test equipment because i sure know i can't do tests for new things at home on my own. Second, i am an avid reader of documentation and whenever new features come up i read up on them, even if i can't try them always out. And, finally: AIX environments are a lot more static than i.e. Linux environments, so there is no need to be as innovative as with those. A typical AIX shop ten years ago ran about half a dozen applications (SAP, DB/2, Oracle, Informatica, Websphere, TSM) and that was it. A current AIX shop does the same, just the versions have changed. Therefore it is somewhat easier to keep up.

Does that answer your question?

bakunin

We routinely dispose of "old" hardware. Sometimes simply because maintenance costs are too high to use a given system for production...

If someone were to pay shipping I would have no issues sending decent Power Systems hardware to whomever is interested. In fact, as I type this, I am sitting across from a pallet of 10 IBM SVC nodes ranging from CF4s to CG8s all headed to a landfill. Behind that I have a pair of CR3 HMCS- sure, they won't run V8R8 but you can at least manage Power 5 thru Power 7 with them..

It's not a problem with HMC - you can buy a server for $100 and install HMC on it, or you make a virtual machine and install HMC into it. It is not officially supported, but for a test environment - who cares about support? But if you want to test some new features like SR-IOV or VNIC with LPM, you need POWER8 server with FC SAN. The only site where you can do it is your customer's site. Or as bakunin said, you invest ca. $50K.

AIX skills: There are different ways - core skills - up to and including AIX 7.1 - can be done on older hardware. I run my portals on a POWER6 - before that they were on a B50 (and AIX 4.3.3).

An HMC can be nice - but if you can get decent used hardware, e.g., with PowerVM activated - you can do quite well with IVM (integrated virtualization manager).

Software: i.e., AIX O/S. difficult. There is no simple way due to licensing.

And to get back to Bakunin's comment about the undoing: the most impact is, imho, coming from the decision to require a HW serial number and a support contract for updates. When that started I saw a large drop in the number of 'beginner' questions on AIX on forums - like those here.

That they did not have this requirement before (such as Linux Enterprises distros all have long had) is not surprising. I just wonder how much impact it has on 'new admins'.

Looking at IBM i admins (aka OS/400) - it seems with the right audience - life can go on a long time. But I am curious about what happens in the next 5 to 10 years as "old-dog" OS/400 (and AIX) admins retire. Will there be any "Elvis" look-alike contests to keep the lights on - or will the lights go dark when "Elvis leaves the building" -

POWER: generally not hard (see earlier posts). I got a Power5 that way as well. The hard part, imho, is getting the initial software (I bought a system from a business partner with official support to get me started. I lag now on my personal systems. "Work" systems are current.