12.4. Installing AIX with the Network Installation Manager

Network Installation Manager, or NIM, is AIX’s answer to Kickstart, JumpStart, and Ignite-UX. Versions of NIM since AIX 5.3 can also install Linux systems. A NIM “master” server installs clients from one or more installation images, where a client can be a stand-alone machine, a diskless or dataless workstation, or a workload partition.^[2] Installations rely on TFTP, NFS, and DHCP or BOOTP, much as on other systems.^[3] NIM is included on the standard AIX installation media.

^[2] A diskless client has no hard disk for local filesystems and relies on network services for storage. A dataless client has only has local swap space and perhaps /tmp and /home filesystems.

^[3] Since vendors all use approximately the same protocols and architectures, aren’t you glad that they cooperated and settled on a standard installation system? :-)