IBM Power servers vs. IBM PowerVM

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Power servers
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Power product line is a family of servers.N/A
IBM PowerVM
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
IBM PowerVM provides a server virtualization environment.N/A
Pricing
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Considered Both Products
IBM Power servers
Chose IBM Power servers
The IBM power systems are really appreciable all the time, and there are many types of powerful servers, and all of the servers are unique. Each one has its own specialty. The big difference that we saw is about the latency itself, and it seems to be like all the other …
Chose IBM Power servers
Other vendor systems pale in comparison to the robust security and ample storage offered by the IBM Power System. Fast processing power that can handle a lot of work with ease and at a high rate of speed.
Chose IBM Power servers
In the evaluation phase, we work on servers with scope and sizes of databases and application by keeping future load in our mind if we have to run such databases we go through with multiple pocs and load run with softwares where we identified IBM servers are one of good in …
Chose IBM Power servers
Power 9 servers give better flexibility, reduces the software requirement, ease of management, minimum downtime
Chose IBM Power servers
We are an IBM shop, so we purchase servers only from them. I have used IBM servers starting back with POWER4, and have been greatly impressed with the advancement over the years in processing power and RAS capabilities.
IBM PowerVM

No answer on this topic

Top Pros

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Top Cons

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Features
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power servers
-
Ratings
IBM PowerVM
8.1
4 Ratings
3% below category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings6.74 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings8.23 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Small Businesses
Dell PowerEdge R
Dell PowerEdge R
Score 8.6 out of 10
Oracle VM VirtualBox
Oracle VM VirtualBox
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 7.3 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(208 ratings)
8.8
(4 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(7 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.6
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Power serversIBM PowerVM
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
I'd strongly recommend IBM Power servers to anyone who has the budget for it. A Power Virtual Machine, what is generally called FlexTB VM, can support as many small VM of 256GB, and scale up to 32TB on the fly. If IBM recommended architecture is combined with your organizational reference architecture, then forget about running into unplanned downtimes.
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IBM
IBM Power VM is well suited in a large environment where we have to run multiple virtual machines on a single hardware and utilize the hardware more efficiently. It directly saves the cost of the organization. Due to the high licensing cost of IBM Power VM, it's less appropriate for smaller, less critical applications that do not need a lot of performance.
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Pros
IBM
  • I love how it supports a mix of operating systems
  • protection of our sensitive energy data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations.
  • It provides a flexibility that ensures that we can accommodate increased workloads without a complete overhaul of our infrastructure.
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IBM
  • Offers a very granular virtualization of each core.
  • Provides a quick and easy environment to build and maintain.
  • Is rock solid and provides a reliable production environment.
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Cons
IBM
  • A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has.
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IBM
  • We have yet to upgrade VIOs from 2.2.0 to 2.2.3 which will provide the more GUI centric management, however, making the VIO servers easier to manage would be one area. I think this is done with the latest versions of HMC and PowerVM.
  • More real-time and historical performance reporting.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
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IBM
The product works. It provides the proven environment to support IBM's primary operating systems that run on the IBM Power processing systems. This by extension includes the IBM various storage products that work within that environment. It has proven to be seamless as the environment has grown and as various new products and version updates have been added. As with most IBM products, the support is excellent.
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Usability
IBM
They are very easy to set up and use once you re knowledgeable enough to deal with it. They are continuously enhance the user experience on the HMC and operations on the systems. Once setup it's like a beast, going on and on. I have experience with servers that are not being rebooted for more than 1000 days
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
IBM
In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM
The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
IBM
Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
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IBM
IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features like LPM, shared processor pool...etc, which makes the environment more flexible.
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Scalability
IBM
This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • In the event of a crash, IBM Power servers offer a variety of simple options to recover the operating system.
  • With the flexibility offered by IBM Power servers, the production business can be improved by making the most of its physical servers.
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IBM
  • We are able to run several LPARs on one frame, which means we do not need to buy as many physical servers. That saves on floor space, power, and heating and cooling of the data center, among other things.
  • Using LPM allows us to do maintenance on a frame without impacting the LPARs, giving us greater uptime.
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ScreenShots