AIX and Linux System Administrators in a Hybrid Cloud World.

Skip Garvin, IBM Power Sales, Americas

Introduction

Many years ago, during the height of the “Unix Wars” the IBM Migration Factory helped thousands of HP, Sun and Digital Equipment clients migrate their Unix workloads to AIX on IBM Power.

One common objection to doing a cross-platform migration like this was the belief that a Solaris, HP-UX or Tru-64 Unix system administrator would have difficulty transitioning to an AIX on IBM Power environment, even though the tasks these system administrators performed were nearly identical.

All those objections and concerns proved to be unfounded and most of the system administrators coming to AIX from different Unix environments made the transition quite easily and were proficient in two weeks or less.

Fast forward to today’s hybrid cloud environments we see those same concerns surface when the discussion turns to transitioning certain workloads from AIX and Linux on IBM Power. We interviewed system administrators with AIX and Linux backgrounds as we developed this paper. We also had a chance to review many system administrators resumes and we learned several interesting things.

·       Most system administrators are “bilingual” when it comes to AIX and Linux and operate easily between the two environments

·       Deep skills in traditional areas like storage management, network management, network protocols, routers and switches, web application servers, scripting and programming, and clustering to name a few are skills they all possess.

·       System administrators are gaining experience with open-source software, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenShift and seem to understand that the discussion is not really about AIX or Linux. It is about developing an enhanced system administrator’s skill set, one required for today hybrid cloud and hybrid operating systems environment.

The view from the system administrators we talked with was consistent, “a competent system administrator, be it for AIX or Linux, will experience minimal issues becoming proficient with either environment”

Here are some of the key reasons why.

The Baseline

“Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.”  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Linux is not Unix. That said, compliance to the POSIX standard has enabled these two operating systems to stay relatively close together. From a navigational point of view, the system administrators we talked with said “the two operating systems are pretty much the same. There are some differences, but they are easy to overcome”.

Similarities and Differences

·       One key difference is that AIX comes to the user as a complete, fully functional operating system. Linux is a kernel and relies on its distributions or “distros” to make it a complete operating system. Each distro will include a GUI, GNU utilities (ls, cp, mv, date, bash shell, etc), installation management tools, GNU c/c++ compilers and editors (vi/ed/nano) and applications.

·       AIX will come with its own system administrator tools. Linux will have system administrator tools added by the company creating the distribution as well as by the client who can choose from a wide variety of open-source tools.

·       While AIX and Linux support several different file systems, UDF, NFS,JFS, and ISO 9660 are common between the environments.

·       The shell scripts are basically the same for both environments. (ksh), (csh/tcsh) and bash are the ones most commonly used.

·       Development tools like perl, php, python, ruby GNU c/c++ compilers are also common between these environments.

·       The native APIs for Linux are Linux/POSIX while on AIX they are SysV/POSIX. Linux also supports non-native APIs like Mono, Java, Win16 and Win32. AIX does not support non-native APIs.

·       There are different backup and restore options for AIX and Linux. AIX has mksysb, mkcd, savevg and others that are common with Linux like dump/restore/ tar cpio and ufsdump.

System administrator Responsibilities

There are countless lists that detail the different tasks for an AIX or Linux system administrator, but they all agree, at a high level, these resources are tasked with the installation, configuration, maintenance and troubleshooting/remediation of issues and outages for all the systems under their care.

A few of the more important tasks for both are listed below.

·       Install and maintain all server hardware and software and ensure all performance and availability goals are met

·       Maintain and monitor all patch releases and develop a patch installation procedure

·       Security and access controls

·       Identity and password management

·       Monitoring and alerts

·       File system creation

·       Installing and maintaining software

·       Backup /restore

While the underlying hardware platforms are different and some of the tools are different the process of executing and completing these tasks are very similar.

System Administration Tools

There are system administrator tools available now that were not available just a few years ago and more are added each year. Many are open-source and available for multiple environments including AIX and Linux.

AIX will come with its own system administration tools that are unique and not applicable for a Linux environment. SMIT may be the best known and is well respected as is ‘mksysb”. In fact, several of the system administrators we spoke with said they wish Linux had a mksysb capability.

Many system administration tools for Linux run on AIX including Zenmap, Webmin, Nagius, php my admin, Puppet, Nmap and my sql workbench.

The AIX/Red Hat command comparison shown in Table 1 below is an excellent example of the commonality between the two environments. There are some differences, but you will see many similarities as well.

The AIX® Toolbox for Open-Source Software

The AIX Toolbox is collection of open source and GNU software built for AIX on IBM Power. These tools provide the basis of the development environment of choice for many Linux application developers. All the tools are packaged by using the easy to install RPM format and there is a strong affinity between Linux and AIX for applications.

Because AIX has a long history of standards compliance, it is generally very easy to rebuild open-source applications for AIX. Listed below are just a few things the AIX Toolbox for Open-Source Software enables a user to:

·       Build and package open-source software for use on AIX

·       Run other open-source packages commonly found in Linux distros on AIX

·       Manage open-source software on AIX using RPM Package Management System

·       Develop new applications for AIX using GNU and open-source development tool

AIX and Linux can use the same package management tools.

The IBM AIX Toolbox contains a collection of open source and GNU software built in RPM Package Manager Format for AIX. Yellowdog Updater, Modified (YUM), and an opensource command line package management utility that enables a system administrator to install, remove, query and manage RPM packages.

DNF or “dandified YUM”, the next generation of YUM is also included in the IBM AIX Toolbox. RPM and YUM are also the primary tools available on RedHat and other Linux distros.

Configuration management and automation tools.

Configuration management automation tools like Red Hat Ansible, Puppet, Chef and others are bringing the AIX and Linux worlds even closer together.

Ansible gives a systems administrator the ability to do the same things on AIX or IBM i as they would do on Linux. Playbooks, based on YAML.file, are written in a very familiar environment and then deployed on AIX.

Ansible allows AIX and Linux system administrators to automate many tasks leading to fewer errors and faster deployments, which frees up resources for more important tasks. They can use Ansible to automate IT operations anywhere in the hybrid cloud environment. Listed below are just a few of the Ansible use cases that can be done in a Linux or AIX environment.

·       provisioning on-premises or in a public cloud

·       operating systems configuration management

·       application deployment

·       orchestration

·       security automation

Becoming familiar and comfortable with these automation tools will not be optional. They will be required knowledge for all system administrators in the future and will be crucial for organizations trying to cope with the skill shortages we see today that will only increase in the future.

Summary and Conclusion

The role of an AIX or Linux systems administrator has been shifting with changes in technology and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It is no longer a role that just reboots servers, patches or updates operating systems, decommissions servers and trouble shoots problems.

I said earlier that one of the things we learned while writing this paper was that “system administrators are gaining experience with open-source software, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenShift and seemed to understand that the discussion is not really about AIX or Linux, it is about developing a “hybrid” system administrator skill set required for today’s hybrid cloud environment.”

Here are a few points to consider.

·       Most companies today have a hybrid cloud strategy

·       Hybrid cloud environments have many critical components, AIX and Linux are just two of them.

·       Very few companies have moved all their workloads to the public cloud.

·       Many companies have workloads that will always run on-premises.

The other key point to consider is that AIX is not going away anytime soon.

·       There are over 80,000 Oracle clients who depend on AIX on Power to run their mission critical workloads.

·       93% of the top global banks trust and rely on AIX on Power to run their mission critical applications like Temenos and Fiserv as do 9 of the top 10 insurance companies and 8 of the top 10 retailers.

·       AIX on Power provides the platform for 8 of the top 10 healthcare solutions, including Epic as well as a stable, reliable platform for analytic software from SAS Institute.

·       IBM launched a major new release stream with AIX 7.3 in 2021 with several extensions being worked on now and a roadmap for the next 12+ years.

AIX system administrators are valuable resources that can work across different operating systems and hardware platforms. They add significant value to their company’s hybrid cloud environment and, while they continue to provide the day-to-day management for critical AIX workloads, many are developing the skills necessary to help their organizations navigate and manage the ever-changing landscape of technology.

                  Thanks to Petra Buehrer and Jayen Shah for their editorial comments

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Table 1 -- AIX and Red Hat Linux Command Comparison