Re: End of the road for 7.1?

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Again not from any official source but following the way of IBM i past....

Mostly agree with you but I DO suspect that 7.1 will run on POWER8+. 
Potentially not directly on top of PowerVM (or as some might say 'on the 
metal') but at least as a virtual partition.

Given that i 7.3, um I mean iNext, has not been announced yet it's not 
very reasonable for IBM to have only one widely supported release 
available for it's newest generation of hardware.  Clearly iNext won't 
be supported by all ISVs yet (though it SHOULD BE) and it should be 
pretty close to iNext announce for POWER8+

This was the way of i 6.1 on Power7+ By the way.


        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 4/7/2016 9:11 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:
> While IBM promises a year's notice before end of support I think the
> upgrade path for 7.1 is going to be a little rocky.
>
> Since IBM said this:
> <snip>
> TR11 was the last Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.1.
> So, there won’t be more TRs for 7.1. We might put a few enhancements back
> into the release, but it’s pretty well stabilized at this point.
> </snip>
> http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Blogs/You-and-i/February-2016/Signs-and-Portents-for-IBM-i-Announcements/
>
> A new TR is almost a requirement for a new respin of the OS.  And a new
> respin is a requirement for significant new hardware.  You have to be able
> to boot from an OS DVD to initialize the new lpar on a new system.
> http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/i/planning/resave/index.html
> <snip>
> Resaves provide:
>      support for new hardware (for example, new I/O devices or newly
> announced models)
> </snip>
>
> And apparently there's a timeline out there which says Power 8+ will be
> out in 2016 and Power 9 will be out in 2017 (not from an official IBM
> site!)
> http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/08/10/ibm-roadmap-extends-power-chips-to-2020-and-beyond/
>
> Then I'm guessing that, unless the TR11 had support for this new hardware
> already (unlikely), that's probably very unlikely that IBM i 7.1 will be
> able to run on any new hardware not yet announced.
>
> This is NOT from any insider information!
>
> Rob Berendt