What’s New With IBM PowerVS In 2025?

April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

It has been six years since IBM launched IBM Power Virtual Server, its public cloud offering for IBM i workloads. Adoption started slowly but has picked up in recent years as IBM fleshed out the offering and expanded it to more datacenters. As we enter the second quarter, IBM is banking on several new features to help it attract more IBM i customers to PowerVS.

Last October, IBM offered PowerVS in 21 IBM Cloud datacenters around the world, including 650 Power Systems customers. Doris Conti, the vice president of Power Systems product management, told The Four Hundred that IBM had enjoyed eight consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and triple-digit signings growth for that PowerVS business.

It’s not clear how many PowerVS customers IBM has now, but if the pace of signing has continued at that rate, it should be well above 700 customers by now. What we do know is that IBM is now offering PowerVS in 22 datacenters around the world, with the most recent IBM Cloud datacenter going online with PowerVS being Chennai in India, IBM offering managers said in a recent webinar.

IBM currently offers PowerVS in twelve cities. Some cities have multiple IBM Cloud datacenters, including Dallas, which has four, and Washington D.C., which has three. It has also expanded the reach of PowerVS with the May 2024 launch of PowerVS Private Cloud, which allows customers and IBM partners to run PowerVS, either on-prem or in their own datacenters.

PowerVS is all about giving customers a consistent environment and a consistent experience, said Tonny Bastiaans worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server.

PowerVS cloud datacenters. (Source: IBM)

“Where we really see the value add of Power Virtual Server, it’s really about the same hardware, the same operating systems as on-prem,” Bastiaans said in a recent IBM i Guided Tour on PowerVS. “We are really able to build up a hybrid environment. It’s the same hardware, it’s the same virtualization, it’s the same operating system. And in that way, we are 100 percent compatible with your on premise environment, so you are really able to run your workload where you want.”

High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) were popular workloads to run in PowerVS, not to mention other private clouds offered by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM customers. Increasingly, customers are trusting PowerVS to run production workloads, including those that depend on low-latency connections to power transaction processing.

For instance, one PowerVS customer is First National Technology Solutions (FNTS), which handles credit card transactions for customers in Latin America and the U.S. The company, which also developed its own encryption solution that we covered back in 2023, is happy with the speed of PowerVS in IBM Cloud.

“You can imagine that if you swipe your card, you don’t want to wait a minute before the transaction is” completed, Bastiaans said. “They [FNTS] really tested it out, and they really they saw that the solution was applicable, the speed was there…The latency is not an issue.”

Now it’s IBM that’s hoping to move fast with PowerVS, according to Dan Sundt, worldwide offering manager for IBM i. “2024 was the year of acceleration,” Sundt said in the IBM Guided Tour. “We really tried to do a lot of things to make it easier for customers to move to cloud, take advantage of technologies in the clouds.”

One of the new PowerVS features that customers might like to know about is Migrate While Active, which IBM first unveiled last October and started shipping in January. The new service leverages asynchronous data replication facilities within Db2 Mirror to move customer data from on-prem Power servers to PowerVS servers running in IBM cloud.

IBM supports PowerVS Pods running on-prem and in the cloud. (Source: IBM)

IBM designed Migrate While Active to streamline the process of moving data to the cloud while minimizing the downtime associated with the migration. IBM i customers should find the offering compelling, Sundt said.

“There’s really only that first little source outage that we have to capture the save, and then that last outage as you flip the switch,” he said. “The rest of the time, you are migrating your data. Especially for our mid to large customers that have a lot of data, we’re expecting quite a bit of adoption of this technology of this product.”

Another new PowerVS feature that may not have gotten as much attention as Migrate While Active is support for Virtual Serial Numbers, which make it easier to shift software licenses from one server to another.

IBM first rolled out support for Virtual Serial Numbers three years ago with on-prem Power servers managed under a Hardware Management Console (HMC). In December, IBM quietly added support for Virtual Serial Numbers, making it easier for PowerVS customers to move IBM i and ISV software licenses or subscriptions from one machine to another.

“As we move you around cloud for planned or unplanned outages or maintenance, your serial number won’t change, your ISV software won’t change for those that are using serial numbers,” Sundt said. “We think this is a great capability that’s going to really drive up adoption of Virtual Serial Numbers, especially in Power Virtual Server.”

Sundt also mentioned Global Replication Service (GRS) as another new feature in PowerVS. GRS is a hardware-based data replication capability that comes from IBM’s Spectrum Virtualize, the software that manages IBM FlashSystem SAN arrays. IBM added GRS to IBM Cloud back in 2022, so it’s not exactly new.

All in all, PowerVS is growing into a mature offering. It supports two classes of hardware (Power9 and Power10), three operating systems (IBM i, AIX, and Linux), and four storage options (Fixed IOPS, Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tier 3). Customers can run on shared systems or pay extra for a dedicated box. can start at one-quarter of a Power core and add more CPW at one-quarter core increments. They can add and subtract memory as needed.

PowerVS customers can run on-prem, in IBM Cloud, or a mix of both. PowerVS is metered hourly and billed monthly in true pay-as-you-go fashion. Everything at the operating system (IBM i 7.2 through IBM i 7.5) and lower is monitored by IBM, and customers can manage their PowerVS environments from a single pane of glass.

In short, PowerVS is shaping up to be the enterprise cloud offering that IBM i customers always wanted, and that Big Blue always needed to offer its IBM i customers. That’s good for IBM i customers, and good for IBM i.

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