5137ch03.fm
Draft Document for Review October 14, 2014 10:19 am
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IBM Power Systems E870 and E880 Technical Overview and Introduction
For more information about Active Memory Expansion, download the document Active
Memory Expansion: Overview and Usage Guide, found at:
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/pow03037usen/POW03037USEN.PDF
3.4 PowerVM
The PowerVM platform is the family of technologies, capabilities, and offerings that delivers
industry-leading virtualization on the IBM Power Systems. It is the umbrella branding term for
Power Systems virtualization (logical partitioning, IBM Micro-Partitioning, POWER
Hypervisor, VIOS, Live Partition Mobility, and more). As with Advanced Power Virtualization in
the past, PowerVM is a combination of hardware enablement and software. The licensed
features of each of the two separate editions of PowerVM are described here.
3.4.1 PowerVM edition
Power VM Enterprise Edition (#5228) is standard on Power E870 and Power E880 servers.
Power VM Standard Edition is not supported on the Power E870 and E880. PowerVM
Enterprise Edition offers all PowerVM features including Advanced Memory Sharing (AMS)
and Live Partition Mobility (LPM) for specific operating systems. To verify the details what is
specifically supported by the operating system go to the Table 3-3 on page 129.
Active Memory Expansion (AME) is available as an additional feature #EM82.
3.4.2 Logical partitions
Logical partitions (LPARs) and virtualization increase the usage of system resources and add
a level of configuration possibilities.
Logical partitioning
Logical partitioning was introduced with the POWER4 processor-based product line and AIX
Version 5.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 operating
systems. This technology was able to divide an IBM eServer™ pSeries (now IBM System p)
system into separate logical systems, allowing each LPAR to run an operating environment
on dedicated attached devices, such as processors, memory, and I/O components.
Later, dynamic logical partitioning increased the flexibility, allowing selected system
resources, such as processors, memory, and I/O components, to be added and deleted from
logical partitions while they are running. AIX Version 5.2, with all the necessary
enhancements to enable dynamic LPAR, was introduced in 2002. At the same time, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 9.0 were also able to support dynamic logical
partitioning. The ability to reconfigure dynamic LPARs encourages system administrators to
dynamically redefine all available system resources to reach the optimum capacity for each
defined dynamic LPAR.