I’m one of the people that has discovered that IBM have created a really great power machine called the IBM OpenPower (http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/openpower/). This new machine features Power5 CPU’s, great performance and runs the Linux (SuSE or RedHat) operating system. Even virtualization is possible through an additional feature.
Unfortunately, I was told today that IBM has no intention of recompiling their source for Domino for the 64 bit Linux distributions. WHAT??? WHY??? I would happily be one of the first people to buy a machine if I could run Linux on it with virtualization for: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 6.5.x (and R7.x), IBM Lotus Workplace and IBM WebSphere Portal Server.
Does anyone know why IBM have taken this decision? I have been told so often by IBM that iSeries is a consolidation server, that we need to centralize things to ease system administration etc. By it seems that it is not possible to do it all on any machine from IBM today… at least not if you don’t want to run Microsoft Windows or have the money for buying an i5 with so much RAM and disk that is needed for this type of installation.
One would think that the Lotus divisions would follow the general direction of IBM. IBM is pushing these pSeries boxes and they truly are Sun killers, but for some mind boggling reason you can’t run Notes unless you wish to run unsupported.
It seems as though Lotus just does not care about the midrange boxes. I laugh at running Notes on a zSeries. Why should a run on an enterprise box that can have 3 years of uptime when the application rarely has 2 months of uptime with R6. I would stick with Sun since they are the best midrange solution, but since Lotus now prices per processor it just doesn’t make sense to run with a dying processor line.
It just amazes me that Oracle is certified on every IBM platform that I know of but with Lotus they are far behind their parent company.
AIX 5.3 - not at all
AIX 5.2 on Power 4/5 - nope
Linux on Power 4/5 -nope
Linux on Opteron - nope
Redhat ES4 - nope (this is understandable since new)
SLES 9 - nope
Solaris 10 - nope (this is understandable since new)
SLES 9, Redhat ES4, and AIX 5.3 are required for dynamic LPARs which would be an excellent option for Notes partitions if only…
At a quick glance it doesn’t look like there are any new platform supported by R7.
In case IBM/Lotus would consider porting Lotus Notes/Domino to the Linux 64 bit on OpenPower machines here is a great link for the 6 steps needed in the process ;o)