AIX Alternate Disk Installation
Jeff Marsh
In this article, I will describe some tools within AIX (some new, some old) that can help you reduce the off-hours time spent by your administration staff during maintenance upgrades. I will also show you some uses for these same toolsets that can help you reduce recovery times due to rootvg corruption.
Alternate Disk Installation
What is it? According to the IBM AIX Installation Guide:
"Alternate disk installation, available in AIX Version 4.3, allows installing the system while it is up and running, allowing installation or upgrade down time to be decreased considerably."
Thus, with another set of bootable drives within a server, you can install maintenance (e.g., upgrade your system from AIX 4.3.3.04 to AIX 4.3.3.06) during the day without interruption or any effects to the running applications. However, you will still need a reboot to make it active.
The support model prior to Alternate Disk Installation required all work to be done off-hours during an application maintenance window that generally took two to four hours. Now you can reduce that off-hour time from two to four hours per server to just the time to reboot. I'll also show you how you can complete multiple upgrades in that same reboot window using Network Installation Manager (NIM).
Requirements
To enable Alternate Disk Installation, you need to install the following base-level filesets and upgrade to at least these corresponding fileset levels. These filesets do not require a reboot to install:
Base level filesets: Fileset levels:
bos.alt_disk_install.rte 26
bos.alt_disk_install.boot_images 27
You will also need another free, bootable drive within your server. In this case, you are configuring new servers with four internal drives for systems administration purposes: two drives for the primary rootvg mirrored, and two for alt_disk_install implementations.
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