AIX’s 40th Anniversary Celebration Is Underway
Rob McNelly shares the latest IBM news and support updates, plus details from the recent storage announcement
Recently I noted that AIX turns 40 this year. Here’s an IBM community blog on the same topic:
“Forty years ago, IBM introduced AIX to the world—an operating system engineered for one purpose:
to run workloads the world simply cannot afford to stop.
“What began in 1986 as an ambitious UNIX innovation has steadily evolved into one of the most resilient, secure, and trusted enterprise platforms ever built. Today, AIX quietly powers industries that require absolute continuity—finance, healthcare, transportation, public sector, telecommunications, manufacturing, and beyond.
“And now, as AIX turns 40, its mission is more relevant than ever. Not only does it continue to carry traditional mission-critical workloads, but it has also become a strategic foundation for modern Oracle deployments and AI-driven enterprise operations.
“This is the story of AIX—its journey, its endurance, and its future.”
Read the rest here.
New Storage Systems, Enhanced AI Capabilities and Much More
If you’re like me, you rely on IBM storage solutions in your Power Systems environment. IBM just rolled out three new enterprise storage systems, among other significant additions:
“IBM today unveiled the next generation of IBM FlashSystem, co-run by agentic AI, ushering in a new era of autonomous storage. By enhancing FlashSystem’s existing AI capabilities with agentic AI, IBM is redefining resilience through sustained protection, autonomous threat analysis, and customized recovery recommendations. Clients can now turn storage into an always-on layer of intelligence, enabling reliable and secure storage operations that can reduce the manual effort of storage management by up to 90%.
“The new portfolio includes:
* Three new systems – the IBM FlashSystem 5600, 7600, and 9600 – which deliver up to 40% greater data efficiency for improved capacity footprint and performance, compared to the previous generation.
* FlashSystem.ai, a new set of intelligent data services that help administrators manage, monitor, diagnose, and remediate issues across the entire data path.
* The new fifth-generation FlashCore Module all-flash drive, which is engineered to provide hardware-accelerated real-time ransomware detection, data reduction, analytics and operations, with advanced telemetry and consistently low latency at scale.”
There’s plenty more, so be sure to read the complete announcement.
Using NIM in IBM Cloud Environments
A client recently asked if NIM works as expected in IBM’s cloud. Short answer: yes.
As it happens, I’ve been doing more with PowerVS recently. Here are a couple of related docs from IBM:
* This IBM Cloud document explains how to “… provision an AIX virtual machine (VM) and use it as a NIM server for troubleshooting purposes or for downloading fixes and updates.”
* This IBM Support Q&A covers “… configuring NIM on a PowerVS and migrating an AIX VM NIM client from AIX 7.1 to AIX 7.2/7.3, as well as other operations.”
A Guide to IBM i Tape and Tape Library Devices
As I’ve mentioned, while I’ve spent most of my career working on AIX and Linux, I started out on the AS/400:
“… in the late 1980s I worked on AS/400 systems, the predecessors to IBM i. Part of my job involved tending to a line printer that required us to change paper and forms. The most exciting part of the job was changing from green bar paper to white, and then back again (with an occasional run of custom forms thrown in).
“The AS/400 was a great platform to work on as a computer operator. And compared to other operating systems of that era, OS/400 didn’t require much care and feeding. Those machines just ran.”
With all that as a lead-in, let’s return to the present. I want to highlight this document that lists IBM i-supported tape and tape library supported devices. The doc is broken out into sections with detailed information on solutions that involve fiber channel, virtual tape devices, VIOS partition-owned tape drives and much more. The above link is well worth a bookmark.
IBM Support Security Bulletins and APARs
* “Vulnerability in Perl could allow an attacker to cause a denial of service or possibly execute code (WS-2025-0004). AIX uses Perl in various operating system components.”
* “AIX LPARs may leak kernel heap memory, hang, or crash. These issues may occur during normal process scheduling with no specific trigger. They are more likely to be seen on 7.3 TL3 and later, on LPARs with multiple SRADs configured, while running workloads that have a lot of shared memory activity.”
* “AIX Xorg X Server: Updated Feb 24 2026. (New iFix for 7.3 TL3 SP2 provided with correct fileset prereqs. Updated the affected fileset levels to show that 7.3 TL3 SP2 is vulnerable.) Vulnerabilities in Xorg X Server could cause a memory corruption or denial of service (CVE-2025-62230, CVE-2025-62231).”
VIOS and Name Resolution
IBM Support recently produced this doc on hostname resolution options in VIOS:
“Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) relies heavily on hostname resolution during system startup and for the operation of internal components such as change manager, CMDB, clustering services, and local databases.
“Incorrect resolver configuration in /etc/netsvc.conf can lead to hostname resolution failures that impact internal VIOS services, even when external network connectivity appears healthy.
This technote explains how hostname resolution works on VIOS, describes the available resolver options, and provides clear guidance on selecting the appropriate configuration for common environments.
“Unlike general AIX systems, VIOS relies extensively on local hostname resolution during system startup. Several internal services require the VIOS hostname to resolve successfully before external networking is fully available. As a result, correct resolver configuration is critical to stable startup behavior.”
That topic naturally flows into this one:
“On VIOS boot while messages are displayed to the console screen, an error message may occur with the text “pg_dump: error: no matching schemas were found”. After boot, the error log would contain an error log entry with title of “VIO_INFO”. During boot, messages include PostgreSQL tooling errors (pg_dump / pg_restore) and CM/CMDB artifacts. VIO_INFO entries appear in the VIOS error log.
“This typically occurs when the VIOS Change Management Database (CMDB) cannot resolve the system hostname, preventing population of its internal database. As a result, internal CM/CMDB initialization fails at boot, which is treated as a fatal condition for the CMDB workflow.”