Thank you in advance for taking the time to review my post. I'm new to Power systems and AIX. Most of my infrastructure work is in the VMware/Storage/Networking space and while I can see that there are a lot of similarities between VMware and AIX there are also a lot of things that are different.

My organisation is looking to replace a critical system being used by the business. The new solution like the old will run on AIX. We have been advised to purchase two of the 8408-8E8 models which have 512GB RAM and 24-core 3.02GHz and these will be deployed in separate but local datacentres roughly 15 miles apart.

I'm trying to figure out what licenses are required and how many are required and very roughly what that would cost. Yes I would like to speak with our suppliers, but I cannot go down that road for now.

Apparently I need to buy licenses to unlock the cores (I assume the 24 cores are made up of two processor modules, each supplying 12 core) as well as licenses to unlock the memory. Then I need to buy licenses to install the operating system (to support 7.1.4). I need functionality available in PowerHA Enterprise and PowerVM Enterprise.

So my questions are;

1) Are any of my assumptions incorrect? 2) What is the very rough retail cost of the processor and memory unlocks? 3) How many licenses of PowerHA and PowerVM do I need and very roughly what will that cost? 4) Is there other functionality that I need, which I have listed out here that requires more licenses? 5) Is there a yearly subscription/maintenance cost for any of the above items?

I've been involved in projects in the past (mostly this issue pops up in the storage area) where we want to do things a certain way, but don't realise until it is late in the game that what we want to do means buying some very expensive licenses to upgrade the platform. I'm trying to avoid making those mistakes and get a better handle on the expected total capex cost to build these boxes.

Regards, Paul