A little out of my depth here, but I have an issue that I'd like to try and resolve if possible and after the weekend it may be that I have to use a vWPAR.
At the weekend I tried to migrate an LPAR from a P770 to an S824, a number of these have already been migrated however this one is at a slightly lower level.
All LPARS with a level of AIX 6.1 TL7 SP10 and above have gone over fine, but at the weekend there was an attempt to migrate an LPAR at AIX 6.1 TL7 SP6-1241 which failed miserably.
It failed with no indication that there had been a failure, just downloaded the spot and hung at that point. All the normal things to check have been checked and I think that this must be a glitch that revolves around the version, although I would have thought that if you can run AIX 5.3 native on an S824 then this one would have been supported.
Anyway, to get to the point. I can only find references to vWPARS for AIX 5.2 and AIX 5.3, so can anyone tell me if the above version of AIX 6.1 will run in a vWPAR?
michael@x071:[/data/prj/gnu/libtasn1-4.12]oslevel -s -q | grep 6100-07
Known Service Packs
-------------------
6100-07-10-1415 # week 15 2015 - and POWER 8 was known
6100-07-09-1341
6100-07-08-1339
6100-07-07-1316
6100-07-06-1241 # week 41 2012 - and POWER8 was unknown
6100-07-05-1228
6100-07-04-1216
6100-07-03-1207
6100-07-02-1150
6100-07-01-1141
You 'should' be able to update from SP06 to SP10 without breaking anything. The definition of a TL is that it is feature 'fixed'.
I am much more Solaris oriented and just thought that the vWPAR would be similar to a zone - so am I correct in assuming that you can only run AIX 5.2 or 5.3 in a vWPAR and have to run anything else in an LPAR?
WPAR (workload partitions) are similar to Solaris containers (BSD jails). vWPAR (virtual WPAR) are to run a lower level AIX than the HOST.
vWPAR5.2 was build originally for AIX 6.1, vWPAR5.3 to run AIX 5.3 on AIX 7.1.
I do not expect a vWPAR6.1 because AIX 6.1 can run natively on POWER8 (AIX 5.2 could not run on POWER6, and AIX 5.3 could not run on (all) POWER7. So vWPAR made it possible to scrap old hardware and still run older versions of AIX and their applications - often at a lower software license cost (fewer proc needed for same load).
Note: a POWER8 partition can be as small as 0.05 entitled capacity. (POWER7+ as well).
We are talking about something different, I'm looking at Versioned WPAR's. Which I had mistakenly associated with branded zones, which allow very efficient use of resources.
In the solaris world you would create a domain (LPAR equivalent almost) then you would create the zones which could be Legacy (Solaris 8 or 9) or native 10 under solaris 10. The later versions of Solaris get a bit more complex.
But basicaly you could if you wanted run thousands of zones on a single machine - performance could be an issue though!
As an addition I would say that AIX 5.3 runs native on power8 so why have a versioned WPAR for that?
It is 10 years ago - when I heard the comparision: WPAR is similiar to Solaris Containers. Sounds like - if that was ever true the correct comparision today would be:
vWPAR: legacy zone
WPAR native zone
And yes, they are very efficient ways to use resources - and this efficiency is why we may want them.
FYI (native) WPAR come in two forms: System (which is what we have, basically, been discussing) and Application (where the application thinks it has a whole system, but actually it is only the application (e.g,, sendmail, httpd) that "is the WPAR". Instant creation and cleanup, more or less.