Virtual machine for unix

I suspect that you are not going to have much luck with that.

Given that AIX is based on the RISC chip architecture and not x86. The only way you could possibly do this is to run BOCHS to emulate the chip but I've not found anybody that's managed it.

Sorry, just not physically possible seems to be the answer.

Not to mention the licensing issues. I believe that AIX is only licensed for use on the hardware it is supplied with.

It's been so long since I logged on to an AIX box I wasted 5 mins having a search. There was an x86 build back at version 2.0 it would seem, but this was more of a test release than a general release and never got followed up. There was an Itanium build (please see the sticky if you don't know about Itanium) back at 5L in ~2001. Strangely they never bothered doing it again!

As for the licence, I believe it's worse than that. Even if you had the HW and a disk to install on it you would still need to speak with the nice man at IBM and pay him money. There are a few places on-line that will sell you old workstations with a licence but unless you REALLY needed AIX I'd say your better to find a solution using cross platform tools.

Indeed, but you can virtualise it in theory, just it'd be horribly inefficient... like PearPC (emulating PowerPC so you could run PowerPC Mac OS X)

Pear was only emulating Power3, AIX 6.1 was Power5 I believe, really not sure if anybody ever managed to get Power5 virtualisation working, let alone install anything on it.

I did have a look and like I say nobody seems to have managed it.