operating system - How do i create a VM Ware Image of an AIX LPAR?

Question

I want to clone a AIX LPAR and was wondering if the physical machine could be converted into a VM Image?

I have used the VMWare Converter to create a VM Image of a physical windows box and the documentation states that you can do that for Linux Boxes too.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

I don't see information on AIX or the other UNIXes.

If creating an VM Image of an existing physical AIX box is not feasible is there any easy way to clone the AIX image to another AIX machine.

The primary intent is to avoid re-creating the setup that is already performed for the current AIX box and we want a duplicate environment with the same setup.

Answer 1

VMware supports x86 (and x86_64) architectures for host and guest only. IBM AIX runs on the Power architecture, and VMWare does not do architecture emulation, so what you want does not exist.

If you want to back up/clone your AIX instance to another machine, look for information regarding mksysb and AIX Sysback.

You might want to take a look at the following, but there are no guarantees, and I'm fairly certain running AIX on anything but a Power architecture is still not a reality at this time:

• Qemu
• PearPC