I tried to find an explicit confirmation on VMware website if there is any chance we could virtualize AIX running on pSeriese architecture (P5, P6 and P7), but in vain.
so far we have only one product available which is PowerVM (IBM Product) but we are trying to find alternative solutions to evaluate pros and cons before taking any action. Even Xen mentions the support for Power PC but for Linux not AIX.
I hope someone could give an insight on this matter.
Update
Xen or VMware are not the only products we are open to use. if you know any other product other than PowerVM, we are interested to learn about
Clarification
we already have the Power PC servers in place, we already have our legacy systems running on AIX 5.3. we are not planning to run any of these applications on x86 CPUs nor planning to move to other than AIX for these mission critical systems in place.
Too bad the answer is no
Best Answer
VMWare is a hypervisor for x86/x64 systems, not an emulator of other CPU types - it can't do what you want. Xen is available as a native hypervisor for PPC 790 systems but needs to run on that hardware. I think you'd stuck with PowerVM sorry.