IBM PowerVM provides a server virtualization environment.
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Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
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OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
Although not entirely the same, they are both provide system provisioning solutions. IBM PowerVM edges slightly ahead here as it can provision AIX, RHEL and SLES workloads.
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 …
Very similar, just supporting different operating system environments. Both products are rock solid and well supported. Both products have a surrounding group of other management products that are tested and integrated to provide a comfortable group of system support …
Our company utilizes VMware and PowerVM. VMware is very user friendly from an IT support view and makes supporting Windows OS easier. PowerVM is moving in that direction. PowerVM is better in that you can prioritize workloads across different VMs and be granular in your …
Red Hat maintains a consistent user interface across their products, and their feature sets facilitate easy and rapid adoption. Configuration as code is the optimal approach for all of them, and they all provide a level of command-line access that ensures teams can work in the …
OCP and OpenShift Virtualization are better for a code based infrastructure our organization is attempting to move towards shortly. VMware has also been acquired which has added instability with their future. We are planning to move all VMware workloads to OpenShift …
I don't have as much experience with the other two, I have heard of them and know they are container management systems. I have the most experience with Red Hat OpenShift.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Data Grid, Red Hat Integration, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
As a specialized partner in container platform Red Hat OpenShift is our preffered solution. It provides a supported kubernetes platform which contains all the required tools to make the life of customers easier and offer them the same experience accross all hyperscalers, …
I find OpenShift opinionated but also requiring less configuration to be functional than the other platforms that I've mentioned, and Tanzu requires Faustian contracts to be signed.
IBM PowerVM only is available on IBM POWER machines. It makes live much easier, compared to bare metal machines (OPAL) or machines with KVM. Personally I would not like to manage systems that don't have IBM PowerVM. The current line-up always includes IBM PowerVM (firmware built-in).
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
One of the big advantages of Red Hat OpenShift is, especially over Kubernetes itself, is that it provides a lot of built-in operators for doing a lot of different things right out of the box that you don't have to worry about trying to configure. So one of the big ones is, I mean, right in your face is that user interface and being able to work with it inside of a browser. And I think that works very, very well.
Each LPAR comes with a profile that sets a minimum, desired and maximum capacity (like for CPU). You can freely change the allocated CPU between the minimum and maximum on-the-fly. If you want to change the resource below the set minimum or above the set maximum, you need to shutdown the partition first and change the profile. It would be nice if there was a way to do that without downtime too.
(Setting the maximum very high is fine for CPU but not for memory as it allocates a fixed percentage of the maximum (not the current) size for internal housekeeping).
When you manage your Power system with an HMC, a lot of firmware updates can be done concurrent (on-the-fly), not requiring a power-cycle of the machine. If you use Novalink to manage your systems, this proces becomes broken and you need downtime on your physical system. You can use Live Partition Mobility to move every partition off of this system first, but still...
I would say that's the logging part because Red Hat OpenShift write tons of locks and if most time in the finance industry, we cannot use the built in logging infrastructure for compliance reasons. And we have to forward the logs out of the system and this is, it's too much, which we forward from one cluster. Most time we'll build up multi clusters, so we speak about 10 or more clusters. And if you send log files from 10 or more clusters, the logging systems are not prepared to take that much load. And then really often you have license problems with the logging system, so that's not really, really fun. So logging could be improved.
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.
Going to stay with this platform for the unforeseeable future. It matches our Target Architecture 2030 strategy internally to adopt more modularized platforms with Open Source on the back-end so that if needed containerized workloads can move to a different platform. With open-source based application telemetry collection being utilized on the back-end, integrating our already existing oTeL observability based platform makes it easier for our apps to be monitored
I give it a solid ten. For what it is built for it delivers exactly what we need: predictable, controlled and reliable infrastructure. Even though it does have a learning curve, its not too steep to get to grips with and the reward and usability of the system is great. There is fine grained resource control ensuring optimal use of resources. Workload isolation and dynamic lpar reconfiguration ensures consistent and dependable results. Day to day management is handled with ease and confidence. If coupled with an automation solution, it becomes a highly usable platform at scale, allowing teams to standardize workloads
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
I was not involved in the in person training, so i can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen seamlessly without any issue.
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
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.
We utilized the Thycotic Secret Service to manage all our application secrets, resulting in seamless integration with our applications. We developed all the applications using Red Hat Fuse (currently migrated to Quarkus). We used the built-in Kali Linux support of OpenShift to manage and configure the services and API. Additionally, the Red Hat Developer Studio facilitates faster development.
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
It has provided the performance we need during month end and year end closing cycles.
It has been very reliable with little to no downtime.
We have been able to stretch our IT dollars because the refresh rate on IBM Power can run for years. Also, we have been able to add many more VMs to physical machines than other platforms can run.
When you talk about ROIs, I don't have any negative impacts I wanted to call out here. There is no negative impacts. In fact, it's all positive impacts what we set as our milestones towards achieving our goals, towards achieving our greater vision. Red Hat OpenShift has got a big role in it and it is certainly helping us.
