AIX Network Install Manager

Bill Wood

When we replaced our old hardware platform with IBM AIX RS/6000 systems, a main concern was controlling how our new systems would be installed. With the old platform, we ran into several instances where the software (moving from our development group to QA and into production) was not the same, which caused numerous build breaks. We chose the AIX Network Installation Management (NIM) setup, because we needed to ensure consistent, standard OS installations between systems within our four separate data centers. Our company also has a security rule that doesn't allow any one machine access to all networks within our organization. Our four separate data centers have four separate networks with no connection between them, and each network is segmented into either inside or outside the firewall.

NIM Resources

NIM allows you to customize installations and maintain clients on the network from a centralized location (the NIM master) or the NIM client itself. The master contains the NIM database and can serve resources. Resources in NIM are files or directories containing data that NIM will use to install, customize, and maintain NIM clients. A NIM client is any machine configured and defined in the NIM database. Some key NIM resources used in our setup are:

• Licensed Program Product Source Directory (lpp_source): This directory contains backup file format (BFF) images, which AIX installp uses to load software. One way to understand the role of the lpp_source directory in a BOS installation is to compare it to all the installation images needed to support any configuration (specifically different device configurations) along with a base core set of software (called simages) that are on the BASE installation CDs. We created a base 433 lpp_source, multiple lpp_sources containing different maintenance levels, and separate lpp_sources for our 32-bit and 64-bit third-party application software.<>