Hypervisors that support AIX as a guest OS

aixhypervisorvirtualization

I am trying to find out what hypervisors are out there that can support running AIX guests. I know that IBM PowerVM can do it, but I would like to explore other options.

There is also AIX WPARs (workload partitions) which work like Solaris Containers, but I would prefer full virtualization that isolates hardware from OS.

Best Answer

No hypervisors support AIX. Kind of.

AIX running on an IBM Power server isn't actually virtualized in the same way that ESXi/KVM/etc. would do. Everything is handled by hardware.

On top of that, you can use VIOS to do Virtual I/O, but that's ONLY the IO. And only if you need to do so.

The actual hypervisor is the hardware platform itself on Power.

Related Solutions

Guest in Guest Virtualization – How to Set Up

Its possible, read more here - http://blog.jasonruiz.com/2011/01/24/kvm-nested-virtualization-support/
the current purpose of nested virt is testing, but I think it meant to test hypervisors not databases, dns, etc...

in order to test such services I think "normal" virtualization will do.

you can have a few different virtual networks, with different dhcp/dns/routing services.

Can Hyper-V run in a virtual machine

Yes, it can, if the underlying CPUs support the latest virtualization extensions (Intel VT-X/EPT) and if you're using the latest VMware products (Workstation 8, ESXi 5).

The relevant settings in your VM should be as follows:

monitor.virtual_mmu = "hardware"
monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware"
vhv.enable = "TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

The first three settings can be enabled via GUI (where exactly varies slightly between Workstation and ESXi), the last one needs to be manually added to the VM's .vmx file.

Additionally, on ESXi 5, you need to add the following line to /etc/vmware/config:

vhv.allow = "TRUE"

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Guest in Guest Virtualization – How to Set Up

Can Hyper-V run in a virtual machine

Related Topic