IBM AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a UNIX operating system developed by IBM.
AIX is widely used in industries like banking, telecom, government, and large-scale enterprise computing.
AIX is POSIX-compliant and based on System V UNIX, with some BSD components.
This means many commands look familiar to Linux/UNIX admins, but AIX has its own unique tools, too.
AIX typically runs on POWER CPUs that are RISC processors designed for reliability.
AIX includes many enterprise-grade reliability enhancements:
* Logical Volume Manager (LVM) (supports features like mirroring, striping, snapshots)
* JFS/JFS2 Filesystems (journaled file system reduces corruption and speeds recovery)
* Reliability, Availability, Serviceability (RAS) with Hot-swappable hardware, Dynamic resource allocation, Error detection, and self-healing.
Common AIX Use Cases
* Banking systems (core banking apps)
* Telecom billing and switching systems
* ERP systems (SAP on Power)
* High-throughput databases (DB2, Oracle)
* Mission-critical enterprise workloads requiring uptime guarantees
AIX is IBM’s enterprise UNIX, known for extreme stability.
It’s not as widespread as Linux in IT, but in large enterprises, AIX is still in active use.
Enjoy #UNIX
User Comments
Yes. I looked at it and loved it but didn’t do much with it. Aprt from ls. And yeah. 💣
I did work with AIX.
AIX was designed wrongly, so it was unclear whether it was meant to be used as workstation or server.
System software available (like databases, WWW servers etc, etc ..) was not not abundant plus IBM did not make many useful tools for it, like development system.
Another problem with it is that it did not follow the fine IBM line of products with channel technology. AIX stuck to the principle of "everything is a file", instead of a"everything is a filesystem" (like OS/400).
Used AIX for almost everything back in college in the dim and distant past. Development, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, sysadmin training if it was on the course we did it on that platform. Version 2.2.1 on an IBM RT6150, would be interested to get my hands on one again some day to see what I can get it to do now with all I have learned since.
I helped a dude with SCO Unixware before my system engineer detour. It was pretty easy to fix. Now I want to try databases.
The System has to be patched
Don’t lay back.
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/security-bulletin-aix-vulnerable-arbitrary-command-execution-cve-2025-36251-cve-2025-36250-insufficiently-protected-credentials-cve-2025-36096-and-path-traversal-cve-2025-36236
Sends me back to the running man, the amount of time I deliberately mistyped something when I needed cheering up 🙂
without gnu utils (also dev kit option with compiler required) it was such a pain to deal with... only HP/UX was worse than this. 🤪
worked on both AIX and HP/UX a bit back in the day and you're absolutely right! Just thinking about HP/UX gives me a rash 😂
Is there sim labs to practice on these systems ?
We had lots of AIX in banking, as well as point of sale in RS/6000 back in the day.
There where loads of *NIX flavors in Banking AIX, HPUX, Solaris, etc. I think Linux on a LPAR replaced some AIX. That was like 20 years ago.
One time I had the chance to take a look on an AIX server system via BASH in 2017. At first I typed in uname -a to see it‘s real AIX. 😉
I enjoyed working with AIX. I haven't worked with it since 2002 however.
My only complaint at the time was that IBM didn't have remote administration down. So much of the OS patch process needed to be done from the console or you would lose the system.
Otherwise it was always a solid Unix variant.
I remember "patch nights" with Solaris, having to run through the entire tar file or DVD so Solaris could pick and choose what patches it needed. Took all night 😂
Ah Solaris. Another fun Unix. I last worked with Solaris about 10 years ago.
Sun had one of the messiest OS patch systems that I remember. They had all types of patch bundles you could download using your Sun account which you could mix and match. You needed to read the descriptions to determine if they were the patches you wanted.
Oh. If you installed the wrong patch, you could b0rk your system. Did that with sun cluster patches once.
I don't know what Oracle does with Solaris patching these days. I would bet they copied Red Hat's approach.
It`s worth checking. I think there are free downloads of the OS available, offered by Oracle
Well, that was exciting. See you in the next one!