PowerVM Review
May 06, 2016
PowerVM Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM PowerVM
PowerVM is used to provide virtual AIX servers for database applications, some end user applications, and infrastructure apps such as email gateways. These database applications provide data stores for applications across the enterprise. The top 10% of the databases consume 90% of the capacity and IO throughput of the enterprise.
- PowerVM does the best job of allocating cores to VMs and allowing configuration to which you can prioritize VMs and allow VMs to borrow from shared pools.
- PowerVM allows one to configure VMs to optimum software licensing needs.
- PowerVM provides insight to specific VM performance and utilization.
- 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.
- 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.
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 reservation of cores and virtual CPUs. PowerVM allows you to modify VM characteristics while the VM is up and running.