For Starters.

1st post.  You're probably interested in running Puppet on AIX, but everything you've read makes you dubious.  Over the past 9 months, i've been lucky enough to get the chance to actually do it, and run it successfully on AIX 6.1TL5, on power 7 gear, alongside NIM and VIO.  My goal with this blog is to share my learnings, puppet policies, spec files, etc.

What i'm working with here.

Unlike many AIX/P-series shops, my workplace doesn't have 1 or 2 giant P-series systems running AIX that the entire business runs on.  I've heard of these places--the kind of shops that run one or two monolithic systems, running HACMP, Tivoli Storage Manager, etc.  These places tend to have relatively few systems, requiring massive uptime, oftentimes dealing with redundancy at the system level.

For better or worse, my workplace has taken the opposite approach.  With a little help from PowerVM and Oracle RAC, we've rolled out 100's of AIX hosts and dealt with failover closer to the application layer.

The downside to rolling out all of the systems?  Yep, managing them.  Keeping 'em consistent.  And of course, thats where the puppet bits come in.  But before I get there, let me get the whole AIX vs Linux discussion out of the way.  I suspect it needs to happen, so i'd like to head this one off at the pass.

From the ODM, to SMIT (either a crutch, or generally helpful!), to commands that have too many "-o" and seemingly 100's of flags, error logging (what log file do I look at again?), and a continued reliance on inetd and "r" protocols (rsh, rlogin, etc), AIX can be a real bummer.  How about that Open Source Toolbox cdrom they've been shipping with P-series systems that hasn't changed in 3 years?  Yeah, the one where you're installing rpm's titled "*aix5.1*.rpm" on an 6.1 (or 7.1) system.  Or how about the rpm dependency hell required to install any bullfreeware open source development tools (subversion, for ex.) required of any half modern development shop?  Yeah, AIX can be a real bum bum, but we decided to go with it anyway.  Here is why:

We run AIX for stability and Oracle RAC support on a virtualized platform (although this changed after we made our decision).  If you've ever tried to track down a kernel panic at 3 am for an unsupported device driver on a Dell Poweredge, you'll appreciate the hardware integration associated with IBM.  Hell, I bet half of the folks here are reading this are doing so from a likeminded platform--from a macbook.  Anyway, I have little to zero allegiance to IBM, but there are a few upsides.

Less talk, more rock.  I promise to move on to more puppet-centric things in my next post.