AIX 6.1

AIX Version 6.1

AIX 6 is available in three different editions: an Express Edition that includes the functionality of AIX Standard Edition but has some restrictions on vertical scalability, a Standard Edition that includes AIX with no vertical scalability limits and an AIX Enterprise Edition that includes AIX 6, the Workload Partitions Manager™ for AIX and the IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition including several Tivoli® products.

• AIX Standard Edition: The AIX 6 Standard Edition is the edition that many people would think of as “AIX.” The vertical scalability of AIX Standard edition is only limited by the current maximum capabilities of the Power Systems™ platform of up to 64 cores or 256 threads in a single partition. AIX Standard Edition is relevant for most customer workloads.
• AIX Enterprise Edition: The AIX 6 Enterprise Edition includes all the UNIX capabilities of AIX Standard Edition, but also has a significant amount of additional management capabilities. AIX Enterprise Edition includes AIX 6, the Workload Partitions Manager and the IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition. AIX Enterprise Edition includes all of these products under a single ordering and support structure at an attractive price compared to purchasing the individual products separately. AIX Enterprise Edition is intended for clients with large-scale computing environments that would benefit from the additional monitoring, automation, energy, virtualization and network manageability capabilities delivered with AIX Enterprise Edition.
• AIX Express Edition: The AIX 6 Express Edition provides the same functional capabilities of AIX Standard, at a lower price. The vertical scalability of AIX Express Edition is limited to a maximum of 4 cores and 8 GB of memory per core in a single partition. Clients can configure the system with multiple partitions running AIX Express Edition, but each partition is limited to a maximum of 4 cores and a total of 32 GB of memory per partition. AIX Express Edition is primarily intended for clients who do not need the extreme levels of vertical scalability of AIX Standard or Enterprise Editions particularly when consolidating a number of smaller workloads onto a larger server. AIX Express Edition is also suitable for clients with small workloads on platforms such as entry or Blade servers.

All editions of AIX 6 are available on all models in the IBM Power Systems hardware product line. Clients may mix the different editions on a single server. AIX Version 5.3 is only available in a Standard Edition.

Q – Why is AIX Express only available for 4 processor-core partitions? 

A – AIX Express is targeted for smaller installations as is reflected in the price point. Thus, it is restricted to availability for 4 processor-core partitions only.