Chapter 3. Virtualization - IBM Power Systems E870 Technical Overview And Introduction

Draft Document for Review October 14, 2014 10:19 am
Virtualization
Chapter 3.
As you look for ways to maximize the return on your IT infrastructure investments,
consolidating workloads becomes an attractive proposition.
IBM Power Systems combined with PowerVM technology offer key capabilities that can help
you consolidate and simplify your IT environment:
Improve server usage and share I/O resources to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)
and make better usage of IT assets.
Improve business responsiveness and operational speed by dynamically reallocating
resources to applications as needed, to better match changing business needs or handle
unexpected changes in demand.
Simplify IT infrastructure management by making workloads independent of hardware
resources, so you can make business-driven policies to deliver resources based on time,
cost, and service-level requirements.
PowerVM license: Enterprise edition is default on Power E870 and Power E880.
IBM plans to add NIC SR-IOV capability to POWER8 servers using selected SR-IOV capable
PCIe adapters. The adapters planned to be added are 4-port Ethernet Adapters with copper
twinax ports (#EN0K, #EN0L, #EL3C), SR optical ports (#EN0H, #EN0J, #EL38), and LR
optical ports (#EN0N, #EN0M).
The minimum version of the VIOS supporting Power E870 and Power 880 servers is VIOS
2.2.3.4 with ifix IV63331 or later.
PowerKVM: PowerKVM is not supported on the Power E870 and E880. PowerVM is the
only virtualization technology available for these systems.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2014. All rights reserved.
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