IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of a dizzying array of software.

Both have happened in announcement letter AD23-0282, which came out on August 8.

First, IBM is doing away with the base version of its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor. Way back in the day, IBM used to sell three different versions of PowerVM on its Power Systems servers. The Express Edition was available starting on Power6 machines and it allowed customers to create up to two logical partitions on a pSeries or System p server that could carve up compute and I/O capacity. It also included the Virtual I/O server, a stripped-down AIX kernel that was used as a go-between to provide virtual support for various IBM adapter cards and peripherals. Express Edition also included the Lx86 emulator for X86 binaries running on Power CPUs and the Integrated Virtualization Manager configuration tool, which is a graphical interface for the Virtual I/O Server. Express Edition was available for free.

PowerVM Standard Edition added the Partition Load Manager for AIX and was available on Power5 and later processors and allowed the hypervisor to have more than two partitions. (In fact, customers can have up to 10 logical partitions per CPU core, which is a neat trick considering that since the Power7, there have been eight threads per physical CPU core. Standard Edition had a nominal fee per core.

With PowerVM Enterprise Edition, Live Partition Mobility – the ability to have running partitions migrate from one physical machine to another – was added. So was Active Memory Sharing, a feature that allows a pool of partitions to share a memory pool on a system.

All Power9 and Power10 servers are preconfigured with PowerVM Enterprise Edition at this point, and thus PowerVM Standard is no longer required. And so IBM is trimmed down to this one edition of PowerVM for all Power Systems machines, simplifying life for itself, its partners, and its customers.

On a similar note, the special version of the OpenStack cloud controller, called PowerVC, that was created by the Power Systems team to be integrated tightly to AIX and Linux, and also useful for IBM i shops that have AIX and Linux partitions, is also being pruned down to the higher-end version. The base PowerVC is being withdrawn and the higher-end PowerVC for Private Cloud, which has a self-service user portal riding atop IBM’s flavor of OpenStack for Power Systems, will be the only version supported on Power9 and Power10 iron.

Both PowerVC 2.X and PowerVM 3.X Standard Edition will be withdrawn on November 10, 2023. So you have some time to plan. Support will be discontinued for these systems programs on September 30, 2024. PowerVM Express Edition went the way of all flesh quite some time ago.

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