PowerVM

PowerVM, formerly known as Advanced Power Virtualization (APV), is a chargeable feature of IBM POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 servers and is required for support of micro-partitions and other advanced features. Support is provided for IBM i, AIX and Linux.

PowerVM
Developer(s)IBM
Operating systemIBM i, IBM AIX, Linux
TypeVirtualization
Websiteibm.com/systems/power/software/virtualization/

Description

IBM PowerVM has the following components:

  • A "VET" code, which activates firmware required to support resource sharing and other features.
  • Installation media for the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), which is a service partition providing sharing services for disk and network adapters.
  • Installation media for Lx86, x86 binary translation software, which allows Linux applications compiled for the Intel x86 platform to run in POWER-emulation mode. A supported Linux distribution is a co-requisite for use of this feature.

IBM PowerVM comes in three editions.

IBM PowerVM Express
  • Only supported on "Express" servers (e.g. Power 710/730, 720/740, 750 and Power Blades).
  • Limited to three partitions, one of which must be a VIOS partition.
  • No support for Multiple Shared Processor Pools.
  • Withdrawn from marketing August 1, 2014. (source)

This is primarily intended for "sandbox" environments

IBM PowerVM Standard
  • Supported on all POWER6, POWER7 and POWER8 systems.
  • Unrestricted use of partitioning – 10× LPARs per core (20× LPARs for Power7+ and Power8 servers) (up to a maximum of 1,000 per system).
  • Multiple Shared Processor Pools (on POWER7 and POWER8 systems only).

This is the most common edition in use on production systems.

IBM PowerVM Enterprise
  • Supported on POWER7 and POWER8 systems only.
  • As PowerVM Standard with the addition of Live Partition Mobility (which allows running virtual machines to migrate to another system) and Active Memory Sharing (which intelligently reallocates physical memory between multiple running virtual machines).

Documentation

See also
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