IBM Gives Away Workload Partition Features Support for AIX

Published: July 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Somebody somewhere must have balked at the prices that Big Blue was trying to charge for the management software that works in conjunction with the PowerVM hypervisor and AIX 6.1. Because last week, IBM slashed the price of the Software Maintenance (SWMA) fees for the Workload Partition Manager tool that is used to manage on AIX 6.1.

Just to recap a little about what Workload Partition Manager (product number 5660-WPM in the IBM catalogue) is. You will recall from my overview of the PowerVM hypervisor back in April that PowerVM Enterprise Edition has two neat features called Live Partition Mobility and Live Application Mobility. Live Partition Mobility allows a running logical partition to be moved from one physical Power server to another one so long as they are using shared storage and are connected with reasonably peppy networking. This feature requires the Power6 processor, but works with AIX 5.3, AIX 6.1, and Linux 2.6. AIX 6.1 also includes Live Application Mobility, which used to be called Workload Partitioning and which allows an AIX application, not a whole partition, to be moved from one machine to another one. Live Application Mobility works on Power4, Power5, Power5+, and Power6 servers running AIX 6.1 and using Network File System as the file system. Live Application Mobility is not a function of the hypervisor, but an AIX feature that could, I think, eventually be pushed down into the hypervisor and even supported on the Linux and i operating systems, too. If you want to manage workload partitions, or WPARs as they are called to keep them distinct from logical partitions, or LPARs, you need Workload Partitions Manager.

Workload Partition Manager costs $625 per core on small Power Systems machines, $1,250 per core for SWMA on medium machines, and $1,875 per core on large machines. IBM offers standard business support on these machines for $125, $250, and $375 per core per year and an additional $34, $68, and $101 per core to uplift that support to 24x7 continuous support. Last week, IBM nuked the SWMA fees for the regular business support for Workload Partition Manager. You still have to pay for licenses to the program, but you get regular support for nothing now. If you want 24x7 support on the WPM tool, the fee seems pretty modest. Prices for a three-year SWMA contract remained unchanged, which seemed a bit odd; those run $213, $425, and $638 per core for a standard contract, with an additional $91, $182, and $273 per core to uplift to 24x7 maintenance for a three-year SWMA deal. IBM did not provide an explanation for its move, but the cost of the partition manager rivals the cost of AIX itself on the machines, and customers were probably griping.

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