IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - May 2018 - 11
looking at a multicloud strategy and trying to work out where their Power Systems assets fit into those multiple clouds." PowerVM Enables Cloud-Ready Computing With previous generations of the Power Systems platform, clients could order their servers with preinstalled PowerVM Standard Edition, preinstalled PowerVM Enterprise Edition or none at all. The new policy of shipping POWER9 servers with PowerVM Enterprise Edition preinstalled means that clients no longer need to decide in advance what their future requirements will be, nor do they need to spend extra for live partition mobility. The PowerVM solution is a firmware-based virtualization layer specifically designed for the POWER* processor. Because it's integrated directly into the firmware of the motherboard, it can deliver greater functionality and higher security than a bolt-on solution. In the early days of virtualization, IT shops applied the technology primarily to tame server sprawl by consolidating scores of boxes to just a few. Workloads were sometimes moved to optimize utilization, but the process typically involved stopping and restarting the application. PowerVM Standard Edition was developed to address these routine virtualization tasks. Today, organizations increasingly want to leverage virtualization and the cloud model for tasks like load-balancing, updates, failovers and real-time backup for disaster recovery. IBM enhanced the capabilities of PowerVM to meet these needs. PowerVM Enterprise Edition includes advanced features like live partition mobility, active memory sharing and remote restart. Live partition mobility enables a user to physically move a running workload from one Power Systems server to another, without disrupting operations. "With live partition mobility, a workload can be moved from server A to server B based on rules and available capacity but without any sort of human intervention," says Robinson. "That means the system becomes like a self-optimizing cloud." ibmsystemsmag.com MAY 2018 // 11