AIX Version 7.1 Editions

AIX 7® is available in three different editions: An AIX Express Edition that includes most of the functionality of AIX 7 Standard Edition but has some restrictions on vertical scalability and does not include the AIX Profile Manager and Cluster Aware AIX capabilities, an AIX Standard Edition that includes AIX with no vertical scalability limits and an AIX Enterprise Edition that includes AIX 7, the Workload Partitions Manager™ for AIX, the IBM Systems Director Standard Edition, PowerSC, SmartCloud Entry, VMControl Enterprise Edition, Storage Control and the IBM Tivoli Monitoring product. The base AIX installation media is the same for all three editions: The client specifies the edition to be installed during the installation process. A new command, “chedition” can be used to identify which edition is in use, or can be used to change the edition dynamically without rebooting.

 AIX 7 Standard Edition: 

The AIX 7 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 256 cores and 1028 threads in a single partition. AIX 7 Standard Edition is relevant for most customer workloads.

 AIX 7 Enterprise Edition: 

The AIX 7 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 7, the Workload Partitions Manager™ for AIX, IBM Systems Director Standard Edition, PowerSC, SmartCloud Entry, VMControl Enterprise Edition, Storage Control and the IBM Tivoli Monitoring product. 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, security and compliance management, energy, virtualization and network manageability capabilities delivered with AIX Enterprise Edition. In addition, AIX Enterprise Edition includes a Cloud deployment offering that is simple to implement and easy to use.

 AIX 7 Express Edition: 

The AIX 7 Express Edition provides the almost 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. AIX Express Edition does not include the Cluster Aware AIX capability of AIX 7 Standard or Enterprise Editions, AIX Express Edition also does not include the AIX Profile Manager plug-in to IBM Systems Director but AIX Express Edition can be managed by the AIX Profile Manager. 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 7 are available on all models in the IBM Power Systems hardware product line