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Power Systems Virtual Server, your IBM Power on a secure and high-performance cloud
Updated May 05, 2023

Power Systems Virtual Server, your IBM Power on a secure and high-performance cloud

DIEGO KESSELMAN | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Software Version

Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud for IBMi

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power Virtual Server

We are IBM Business Partners and we helo customers migrate to IBM PowerVS.
We also provide support and managed services.
  • Performance is great
  • Good backup options with BRMS+ICC or VTL
  • Low latency
  • We can scale from a small lpar to a high-end system
  • It's not 100% self service
  • Support sometimes get slow
  • IBM i / AIX web-console is ugly and disconnects randomly, even when using it
  • Management Console sometimes get stuck
  • Management Console sometimes doesn't reflect actual status
  • Too much job queuing on pick hours so we need to wait for our LPAR to shutdown or start
  • No firewall setup on PowerVS side

Do you think IBM Power Virtual Server delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Power Virtual Server's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Power Virtual Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Power Virtual Server go as expected?

No

Would you buy IBM Power Virtual Server again?

Yes

  • We can provision an IBM i LPAR in less than 1 hour
  • We can get our IBM i LPAR with embedded HA and redundant blazing fast storage for almost the same price as an on-prem system
  • Internet communications are really fast from PowerVS
  • We can get Low-Latency from our LPARs running on PowerVS to other cloud providers on the same region.
Skytap on IBM Cloud or Skytap on Azure can be cheaper, but PowerVS provides fast storage with low latency and high speed Internet connection options.
I don't think our security have changed, but evolved to a cloud model.
The easy to use management console helps customers to manage their instances without all the complexity on their on-prem HMCs
I think IBM PowerVS is an amazing platform for production environments. Maybe is not the best on smaller lpars for developers, but great for real life workloads.

IBM Power Virtual Server Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
8.2
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9
Dynamic scaling
8
Elastic load balancing
8
Pre-defined machine images
8
Security controls
8

Using IBM Power Virtual Server

4 - They are technical specialists and help our customers migrate their workloads to the cloud. They also provide them with technical support once on the cloud.
2 - They are certified in AIX and IBM i. They have also some scripting skills and have studied the way IBM Cloud and Power Virtual Server work to set communications and backups.
  • Data Recovery as a Service and Hot-Site
  • Development and Q&A environments with IBM i and AIX
  • Production environments
  • We have found that IBM Power Virtual Server with Linux can be a great bastion server, specially because of the no-cost VPN and Internet access.
  • We have used IBM i instances to test security changes before running the runbooks in production systems.
  • We are planning to offer a new passive transaction based DRaaS service, based on APIs and scripting to create instances on the fly.
IBM Power Virtual Server is part of our operation and we cannot continue our business without it.

Evaluating IBM Power Virtual Server and Competitors

Yes - IBM Power Virtual Servers has helped us to reduce our technology refresh budget. As MSPs we need to update our systems and keep an eye on our customers budgets. Moving workloads to IBM Power Virtual Servers let us control our costs and keep systems up to date.
And the fast communications with flat rate plans on IBM Cloud side allow us to avoid surprises on our billing.
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Other
The scalability is the main reason we have moved workloads to the cloud, as long as cloud integration.
Some of our customers need to increase their compute power at the end of the month and end of the year. We have also a DR as a service solution, based on the ability to work on low resources most of the time, and increase them when required.
I think we have selected the right tool. Working with IBM as Business Partners has helped us to understand the details on this amazing service, and every month there's a new feature on the offering.