Has anyone installed OTM 5.5 on AIX 5.3?

[otmrookie]

Hi all,

We understand that AIX 5.3 is supported and approved by Oracle but we've also heard some not so pleasant experience from OTM users running on AIX. We'd certainly appreciate it if someone is willing to share their lessons learned from installing and running OTM 5.5 on AIX 5.3, thanks!

[chrisplough]

Re: Has anyone installed OTM 5.5 on AIX 5.3?

Hello,

I've had a lot of experience with AIX and OTM -- in fact, I used to maintain all of the platform support for OTM (then GC3) back at G-Log.

I can tell you that you definitely do not want to run OTM on top of AIX. While it will run, it will not perform well, or run reliably. In face, I spent a fair portion of last year, working with a couple of clients who had major issues getting OTM to run throughout the day without restarting and to meet their performance requirements. Now, keep in mind that this isn't because AIX is a bad OS or because the hardware isn't fast (it is very fast). The problem is that the IBM JDK, which OTM must run on, is very poor in terms of performance and in handling native memory. Since OTM is so intensive and highly multithreaded, the IBM JDK constantly runs out of native memory (not to be confused with the heap), which causes it to crash. I've worked with IBM on this for several versions of OTM, but this hasn't improved.

Many of the clients who started out on AIX are now moving to Linux as their primary platform. However, several other AIX shops have chosen to keep the Oracle DB only on AIX and to put the rest of the OTM tiers (web, app and rpt) on Linux. This allows them to leverage their signification hardware investment, while still not hamstringing their OTM instance.

Simply put, if you choose AIX, you'll end up spending a fair amount of money on me, or someone like me to help stabilize your environment. Rather, I'd save the money and look at alternate platforms.

Hope this helps!

--Chris