IBM AIX vs. VMware ESXi

IBM AIX is a very powerful and extremely stable operating environment. It is well suited for applications that are business critical and cannot tolerate outages. It is best used to address large enterprise level application needs where stability and scalability are of paramount importance. IBM AIX is less useful for small enterprises.

Incentivized

If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!

Incentivized

• IBM AIX is a very stable server product, and I can't recall a time when the server has crashed due to a hardware fault.
• If you have legacy software that can't run on the new-fangled Linux flavors, AIX might be the way to go.
• AIX has a host of built-in management tools that makes system configuration easy for a novice.

Incentivized

• Incredibly quick to deploy. Total installation time of less than five minutes
• Able to easily mount ISCSI storage devices to VMWare ESXi hosts within the GUI
• Allows you to run the product for free - if you stay under the physical core count (and with some reduced features)
• Incredibly stable software - we have not run into any issues that were a direct result of VMWare ESXi being at fault
• Very low hardware resources utilized to run this product

Incentivized

• While there are options to install some standard Linux tools like Bash, they are not always easy to procure
• Allowing easier flexibility in how some tools and CLI options work would make it easier for admins to float between operating systems.

Incentivized

• There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
• Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.

Incentivized

It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.

Incentivized

AIX is robust, helps the systems administrator, is built to prevent easily made mistakes. If you are used to other variants of Unix (in particularly Linux) there is no steep learning curve to get started with AIX. You need to learn the intricacies of the operating system, but that is true for any new operating system. AIX has built-in tools for almost anything you want and has the AIX Toolbox (on the web) for tools that are not included with AIX by default, but can be installed. Installation of AIX is modular, you can select with components and features you want to have installed. Installation of additional components (and usually also removal of installed components) is easy and straight-forward.

The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.

Incentivized

Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.

Incentivized

We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.

Incentivized

There is lots of documentation out there for AIX. On the times I've had to address a hardware issue, IBM's support has been great.

Incentivized

I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method

Incentivized

Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.

Incentivized

Compared to other Unix-like operating systems, IBM AIX is the one with a solid roadmap into the future and is likely to stay around for a long time (it is over 30 years old and still being updated with new features and components all the time). Compared to many Linux variants, the AIX operating system is more robust, easier to manage and well-supported by its vendor.

While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.

Incentivized

We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal

Incentivized

• IBM AIX is more expensive but its worth to have it for the features its embedded with
• It's not suited for small customers because of the hardware cost as the ROI will be less for smaller customers.
• IBM AIX is well suited for companies who has more customers so that ROI doesn't impact.

• Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
• Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
• It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.

Incentivized