I had a similar situation in that I had to move cloverleaf 5.6rev2 from IBM P5 hardware to P7 hardware pronto without a chance to upgrade Cloverleaf.
The P7 hardware has to be 100% virtualized which my system admins told me that meant AIX6.1.
After they looked into it some more they found if the P5 LPAR was upgrade to
AIX 5.3 TL12 SP5
then it would be so close to AIX 6.1 that they could clone the P5 LPAR onto the P7 hardware and expect it to mostly work, which it did.
I was amazed myself that we moved from one physical box to another in a really short amount of time and it mostly worked.
One bummer is that hcilicset will not let you run on your old box to create the entry for the new box.
You either have to wait until you are on the new box or do it manually with an editor which doesn’t work for me most of the time.
Soon I will begin moving forward to get to AIX6.1 and Cloverleaf 5.8.
On the P7 running AIX 5.3 I have noticed a quirk with hcienginestop getting ahead of itself and thinking it is shutdown before it is done shutting down and crashing very infrequently.
On the P7 running AIX 5.3 I have noticed my HACMP aliases commands have to be done from the command prompt to make them work so fail-over is now manual.
I don’t endorse this but was being forced like you and I too did not want to run on my version of Cloverleaf on AIX6.1 becuase I thought that had even more potential problems.
Let’s call this story “THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG!”
Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com