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Chef on AIX
Chef provides automation capabilities for AIX systems. There were technical challenges in porting Chef to AIX due to differences from Linux like a proprietary compiler and two init systems. Core Chef resources work on AIX with some platform-specific resources in an AIX cookbook. The community has contributed resources to the AIX cookbook and improved Ohai data collection. Future work includes support for other Power platforms and Chef Server on Power. Resources were provided for learning more about automating AIX with Chef.
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Chef on AIX
- 1. Chef on AIX JulianDunn – Product Manager, Chef Software, Inc.
- 2. Agenda • Motivations • Technicalchallenges • Platform quirks • Community developments • Test Kitchen support • Resources / Questions
- 3. Motivations behind theChef 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)
- 4. Technical Challenges • Low/nofamiliarity 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
- 5. Platform quirks andspecific 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…
- 6. Community Developments • Contributedmany custom resources to aix cookbook • Overhauled Ohai data in AIX • Blog posts about how to patch AIX systems using Chef
- 7. Knife and TestKitchen 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
- 8. Future work • Q1 OtherPOWER 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
- 9. 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/
- 10.
Editor's Notes
- #3 Take a poll of who is an AIX administrator here, who is here for other reasons. This will guide how much explanation is necessary
- #5 Low familiarity with platform and hardware Need to understand and automate a lot of management systems in addition to AIX (HMC, VIOS, etc.) Unfamiliar with features of hardware virtualization It’s actually a cool platform once you know it, with hw virtualization being king, but user interfaces are terrible XLC – proprietary compiler Required for ensuring future binary compatibility. Ruby compilation procedures do… very weird things. gcc on ppc64 can be flaky and cause Ruby to dump core Still needed IBM AIX engineering support to give us patches to avoid Ruby failing/hanging If you ever need to compile Ruby on AIX with XLC we have a whole directory full of patches: https://github.com/chef/omnibus-software/tree/master/config/patches/ruby No GNU-isms Can’t depend on GNU toolchain Must build everything from source using XLC first for hygiene Must make sure build system isn’t contaminated with GNU versions of tools from IBM No bash – sh is ksh. You won’t believe how much this trips us up No real package manager Packages are RPMs or BFFs – BFF is older format Chef is distributed as a BFF Two init systems SRC and traditional init SRC is kind of like systemd/smf but not as fully-featured Virtualization features are sometimes cool, sometimes not LPAR is a neat concept – hardware virtualization WPAR is like containers before containers were cool Problem with LPARs: takes forever to build a new one, even automated, and you also need to learn NIM to do it well (which we didn’t want to bother with) Problem with WPAR: Bizarrely WPARs don’t support DHCP, so you need to layout a network In advance??
- #6 SRC doesn’t have enable or disable. I don’t get it…
- #7 Many thanks to developers in the (small) AIX community plus customers of Chef that are using AIX, primarily Bloomberg
- #9 Check with Matt on status