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3 Ways IBM PowerVM Virtualization Makes Your Business Better

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Virtualization isn’t just a hot trend. Virtualization is at the center of solid IT strategies across many industries and around the globe. Virtualization lets you take all of the workloads across the enterprise and put them onto fewer systems. This, in turn, reduces your capital costs and increases your server efficiency and utilization.
In the world of virtualization, IBM PowerVM is one of the top contenders. If you want to put the power of virtualization to work in your organization, you should be looking at this cutting-edge technology.

Here are 3 ways that IBM’s PowerVM will benefit your business:

1. Utilization

Increased utilization of resources. PowerVM lets you make the most of your data center resources. Not only does PowerVM maximize your utilization, it also does it in such a way that is more effective and efficient than other VM technologies. With virtualization machines from other vendors, each physical core has its own queue. This means that each processor has to do its own work, and that requests are sent into queues based on workload. If one core finishes its queue, you may still have other processes waiting in other queues.

PowerVM utilizes just a single queue. When a core opens up, the request that's at the front of the line goes to the next available processor. In this way, IBM PowerVM makes the most of your hardware and reduces the possibility that you'll have physical cores sitting idle while requests go unanswered in a different queue.

PowerVM also works with the physical hardware in a Power System to make the most of memory usage. Two IBM technologies, Active Memory Sharing and Active Memory Expansion, help with this. Active Memory Sharing works in a manner similar to the core queue system in power VM. Active Memory Expansion utilizes memory compression and decompression methods to make it seem like physical memory is larger than it is within a given memory partition.

2. Availability

One of the concerns many enterprises have when implementing a VM technology is availability. PowerVM increases the number of workloads on a server, which raises the concern that a process could, potentially, be disrupted. Not only that, when a server goes down there is the potential that more workloads and more users will be affected.

The good news here is that powerVM and IBM Power Systems have a number of features aimed at keeping availability at a maximum. PowerVM provides redundancy through a number of technologies, including shared I/O and multiple VIOS partitions. This eliminates single points of failure in your I/O subsystem, meaning that hardware upgrades, repairs and reconfigurations don't need a planned outage. You can move an application rather than stopping it.

3. Flexibility

PowerVM can handle servers on a broad range of platforms, from Linux to UNIX to Windows. Of course, it supports the full range of IBM servers, including the new POWER7 systems. The competition uses specific VMs for specific server lines. That means that if you reconfigure your data center by getting rid of smaller servers and moving to larger servers, you need to reconfigure your partitions. With PowerVM, you don't have that kind of limitation.