Looking for AIX Practical Experience

I have been in IT for around 7 years now and have benefited greatly from Open Source as well as free commercial offerings like Vmware Server that allow me to setup virtual environments and get some hands on time with different OS's and software.

I am starting a new job in a few weeks which has a mixed environment where i will be exposed to more AIX than Linux and i am looking for a way to get some practical experience with the OS prior to my start date.

I understand that AIX is a commercial project so i'm not going to sit here and ask for a link to a free download but besides reading the documentation on redbooks, which is very good, does anyone have any suggestions on how best to spend the next few weeks to better familiarize myself for working with AIX?

Note: I am proficient on Linux, specifically RHEL and have a satisfactory ability on Sun.

Hi,
get yourself a cheap AIX box in ebay (even older workstations will do - if you can work on a 10-15 year old AIX box you can work on a current one too) and just do some basic stuff - create and drop and extend logical volumes and filesystems, change system time, create users, install some packages and remove them ... AIX has smitty which helps you a lot in the beginning with pretty much any admin task you can think of so get yourself comfortable with it ...
Regards
zxmaus

Practical experience is will be hard
You can buy your self some cheap power4.
But on power 4 you will be able to play only with OS,
maybe some WPARs.

But this what is making this system architecture different is visualization and machine that would allow you to play with that is to expensive.

There is a lot of online trainings quite big bunch of them you can find here
Index of /systems/power/community/aix/AIX_Movies

Also on Youtube you will find a lot of good movies
I would start from that .

You should think about some training
Aix Jumpstat could be a good idea
IBM Course description: AIX Jumpstart for UNIX Professionals (Self-paced Virtual Class) - IBM Training - United States

Maybe your new employer can arrange it for you

Thanks for the suggestions, a quick look on ebay for old ibm hardware shows the price to be a bit high, didn't see anything under a grand but I'll check out the links and see what the training course looks like.

The company i'm going to isn't worried about my skill level with AIX out of the gate so probably not going to get them to pay for training, this is more just because i like to be prepared.

---------- Post updated at 04:09 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:10 PM ----------

@zxmaus
In Ohio,

I don't have enough posts yet to reply to PM's it looks likes. I searched ebay for AIX, came back with about 7 servers all over a grand. Suggestions on my search?

Depends which country you are from or which continent...
There is a lot of offers from Germany/Austria
IBM pSeries RS 6000 7026-6M1 4x750MHz 4GBRAM 583GB HDD | eBay

Put "rs6000" in search and check in google models if you do not have experience. Normally everything over 600Mhz it is power4.
Just check to make sure :slight_smile:

For power4 you should not pay more then 600euro. Does not make any sense to bay power3 and older.

I'd read up on the principles of Virtualisation used by POWER servers as this is what confuses most people. Ask your new boss if he has a server that you can uild up and rip apart to get experience.

And follow MrNMON on twitter, he will keep you updated on interesting stuff.