Chef on AIX

Chef on AIXJulian Dunn – Product Manager, Chef Software, Inc.

Agenda

• Motivations

• Technical challenges

• Platform quirks

• Community developments

• Test Kitchen support

• Resources / Questions

Motivations behind the Chef Client port to AIX

• Many legacy deployments that

work fine – 1000’s of LPARs

not uncommon

• Automate & avoid drift – stop

using SMIT/manual

operations

• Abstract OS for easier porting

to other OSes (primarily

Linux)

Technical Challenges

• Low/no familiarity with platform,

hardware architecture, setup

• XLC - proprietary compiler

• Can’t depend on GNU-isms – bootstrap

systems from scratch

• No real package manager

• Two init systems

• Virtualization features are sometimes

cool, sometimes not

Platform quirks and specific features

• All core Chef resources work out of the box on AIX

• Special resources in core:

bff_package

service – need to specify whether Init or SRC, and some actions don’t work

• More specific AIX resources in aix library cookbook:

Manage inittab

Manage rc.tcpip services

Manage inted.conf services

Change device attributes

Change network tunables

And more…

Community Developments

• Contributed many custom resources to aix cookbook

• Overhauled Ohai data in AIX

• Blog posts about how to patch AIX systems using Chef

Knife and Test Kitchen support

• All internal projects at Chef for now

knife-lpar

kitchen-lpar

knife-wpar

kitchen-wpar

• Come see me if interested in working on the latter two

• Demo

Future work

• Q1

Other POWER platform support – BE and LE Linux (Ubuntu and RHEL 7)

Chef Server on POWER

• Q2

Chef Client for Linux on System/z

• Run by Chef Partner Engineering department; contact partnereng@chef.io for

early betas

Resources

• AIX Cookbook

https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/aix

• Chef Automation using AIX – Benoît Creau

http://chmod666.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/aSM5157-AIXChefAutomation1.pptx

• IBM Power Development Program – short term LPAR rental

https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/stg_com_sys_power-

development-platform

• SiteOx – longer-term AIX LPAR/WPAR/HMC rentals

http://www.siteox.com/

Questions?