IBM PowerVM Reviews

I use the product for partitioning. My clients use it on different operating systems like Linux. 

The tool's most valuable feature is administration. 

The solution's interface needs to be integrated with messaging analysis. 

I have been using the tool for many years. 

IBM PowerVM's stability is very good.

My company has around 1,000 users for the tool. 

IBM PowerVM's customer service is good. 

Positive

IBM PowerVM's deployment is easy and takes two hours to complete if you plan the numbers and partition. Sometimes, we need to make upgrades. However, it's not a big deal. The public information and the use of IBM resources are enough for us.

IBM PowerVM's pricing is cheap. 

My customers are happy to buy the product since they have a stable system. I rate the overall product a ten out of ten. 

It is hardware-level virtualization. It does not consume anything from the computer resources. It is pretty good and is light. It is not like VMware or Veeam. It doesn't require a lot of resources.

You can increase resources with it automatically. You can start with a very small capacity of the computer itself. You can have shared resources between multiple applications of the same virtual machines. It is like a shared pool between resources. It is not complicated like others on the market. First of all, consolidation, and second, it is efficient in resource utilization. It is a very elastic solution.

IBM PowerVM does not support Microsoft. This is the only constraint. The IBM PowerVM supports the AIX system, which is a Unix system for IBM Unix, but it does not support Microsoft Windows.

I have been working with IBM PowerVM for the past twenty-two years.

It is a very stable system. It is, against ransomware, and I can say virus-free. IBM PowerVMI is very tough to penetrate with any virus, and data can be encrypted. There is a lot of added value, especially with the new IBM Power Systems, which is coming with very high, very good features like AI. It does not require any maintenance. We have not faced any issues because it runs on the hardware level, so if the hardware will fail, the IBM PowerVM will fail. Otherwise, it is a machine up and running.

IBM PowerVM is definitely scalable.

Technical support is very good with IBM PowerVM.

The initial setup of IBM PowerVM is not complex.

It requires some skill, of course, because you need somebody who knows IBM systems. However, it is not complex.

IBM PowerVM costs more than other products but the customer does not need to pay additional money for the licenses. In VMware, you need to license everything. With IBM PowerVM it is unlimited and all-inclusive in the price you pay.

I would rate IBM PowerVM a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company or our banking sectors, so it is used for our banking customers and for their core banking systems. Most of the critical systems use IBM PowerVM.

In terms of the technology used in the product, I feel that there are some areas where improvements are required. The tool should offer better clustering options.

I have been using IBM PowerVM for fifteen years. My company operates as a systems integrator company. My company has a partnership with IBM and VMware.

My company provides technical support, so in terms of IBM PowerVM, we are technically equipped. At the same time, IBM also offers support for PowerVM. The support is easily reachable.

I have worked with VMware. I don't think there is a direct comparison between VMware and IBM. Mostly for VMware, it's Windows Linux workload on Intel. For IBM PowerVM, critical applications run on AX and IBM i. Basically, the tool is for critical applications.

VMware offers better clustering options compared to IBM PowerVM.

The product's deployment phase is straightforward since my company has been doing that for the longest time.

For a simple environment, the solution can be deployed in one to two days, but for a complex environment, it takes one to two weeks.

I cannot say there's an impact in terms of cost efficiency since it is more on the reliability side. On the cost side, the tool offers more through lesser downtime or lesser need for maintenance, and that has probably impacted the cost of the tool for the customers.

The tool is competitively priced, especially right now. It is not only the IBM PowerVM you purchase but also the hardware since, in terms of compatibility, they are built for each other.

In terms of reliability, IBM PowerVM is one of the best tools. The tool offers a reliable virtualization technology.

The most beneficial part of the product for system scalability revolves around the area of LPARs and IBM PowerHA.

Most of the time, our customers don't use the tool's live partition mobility to streamline operations because the system rarely goes down. If our customers need to move to another tool, they can just switch to a disaster recovery site.

I have faced no challenges in managing multiple virtual machines with IBM PowerVM. Most of our customers have, like, less than ten virtual machines or LPARs, so managing them is fairly simple.

So far, there has been no focus on the AI part in areas like software or the database. The AI part is new in the Philippines, so we don't have any use cases related to it at the moment.

I recommend IBM PowerVM to others, especially for critical applications. I would not recommend the tool to startup companies or those who can just move to the cloud.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use PowerVM and PowerHA for our ERP system. The primary datacenter has two Power S922 nodes on a PowerHA failover cluster. Each node has two LPARs - one LPAR for Oracle database and another for e-business suite application. The disaster recovery datacenter has one Power S922 node with two LPARs - one for database and another for application.

IBM PowerVM on Power 922 server gave twice the performance of the legacy Oracle SPARC server.

The faster CPU performance came without any increase in license cost of Oracle database and middleware.

IBM PowerVM with IBM Spectrum Protect made it easier to use Cloud based infrastructure services like backup.

IBM PowerVM offers LPAR - the hard partitioned VM which helps us to ensure our Oracle licensing compliance. If you use soft partitioning technologies like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V etc., there will be potentially a major licensing compliance issue.

IBM PowerHA is used for higher availability of our mission critical Oracle ERP system. This high availability feature is used subject to the Oracle's free "10-days failover" licensing policy. This allows us to have a full fledged fail-over cluster without any licensing impact for the secondary server.

The automatic failover feature of IBM PowerHA ensures smooth high availability cluster. However, if the no. of days the failover happened in a year is within 10, then there is no need to buy Oracle licenses for the secondary server. If such failovers exceed 10 in a year, then Oracle license need to be purchased for the secondary server as well. This will potentially lead to huge financial impact. 

IBM may provide an option to switch from "automatic failover" to "manual failover" option if the no. of failovers in a year reached 6 or 7. This will avoid the risk of the automatic failover exceeding 10 in a year if the system administrator fails to make note of the no. of failovers in a year and maintain it within 10.

Read https://www.oracle.com/assets/data-recovery-licensing-070587.pdf to know more about the Oracle's 10-day failover licensing rule.

We have been using this solution since Nov. 2019. 

PowerVM is very stable. After two years, we restarted the servers only once. In comparison, with the legacy SPARC servers, we used to restart the servers every month. 

This solution is very scalable, so you can do a scale up and you can add more processes. It can also integrate with the cloud, which is good. 

IBM delivered the servers, storage and backup solution well ahead of committed delivery time especially when there was a time constraint and IBM was given only 8 weeks delivery period.

IBM completed the migration of mission critical Oracle ERP system successfully with lesser downtime than stipulated by us.

Positive

We used Oracle SPARC M4000 servers. Since these servers were more than 8 years old and in view of impending end of support, we went in for a hardware refresh. 

Initial setup was straightforward as the same done by IBM labs experts.

It was implemented by IBM Labs. I will rate their expertise on implementing IBM infrastructure for Oracle database, middleware and e-business suite ERP system as excellent. They implemented a full-fledged high availability with (1) PowerHA failover clustering and (2) Oracle Data Guard based disaster recovery

If the servers run Oracle database and middleware software, careful attention needs to paid on the impact on on Oracle license cost while replacing the servers. If virtual machines are deployed, use only hard partitioning technology like IBM LPAR. Do not use soft partitioning technology like vmware, Microsoft Hyper-V etc.

We made a 7-years TCO comparison to decide on solution provider (OEM).

IBM Power Servers and Oracle SPARC servers were evaluated. IBM offered flexibility in choosing the no. of cores and high scalability. Oracle offer very limited options in choosing the no. of cores / CPUs. For example, The Oracle SPARC T8-1 servers offered 32 cores as minimum and was becoming expensive for an environment that required only 16 cores of CPU capacity. But IBM offered highly configurable options in terms of the no. of cores like 16, 17, 18, or 19 cores etc. This flexibility in choosing the no. of cores is important since the expensive Oracle database and middleware licensing is based on no. of cores of CPU capacity. 

Oracle allows an option to cap the no. of cores to 16 in its SPARC T8-1 server. While this option may be helpful in controlling the Oracle software license cost, it leaves the remaining 16 cores of CPU capacity unused though the same has been paid for. 

The second reason for choosing IBM Power servers over Oracle SPARC servers was faster processor performance. In view of this faster performance of IBM Power processors, the Oracle database and middleware licensing cost per core of IBM Power server is twice the licensing cost per core of Oracle SPARC server. However, in our environment, the actual performance of IBM Power processor was more than twice as compared to Oracle SPARC processor and due to this the overall Oracle software cost on IBM Power server was lesser than that on Oracle SPARC server in our environment.

As we were replacing aging SPARC servers, the migration downtime was lesser in case of RISC processor technology offered by IBM and Oracle as compared to X86 processor technology offered by HP and Dell. As cutting down the downtime was critical, HP and Dell options were not considered. 

I rate IBM Power servers a eight out of ten. 

IBM PowerVM offers options like dedicated hard partitioning (LPAR), capped partitioning and uncapped partitioning. Careful attention needs to paid while choosing the partitioning options available in Power servers. The hard partitioning (LPAR) option is critical to control Oracle database and middleware licensing costs. This is very important. 

IBM PowerHA is an automatic failover clustering software that helps to achieve high availability of mission critical software. However, since Oracle allows to use its database and middleware software free of cost on the secondary servers of Power HA cluster only for 10 days in a year, the no. of failovers in a year needs to be closely tracked if the automatic failover is configured. If smaller downtime is acceptable, it is advisable to configure manual failover instead of automatic failover of PowerHA cluster software.

Gatron Industries is rolling out one of the largest Digital Transformation program of the Country and require a platform that can provide industry leading Reliability, Availability and Scalability to host the Critical Tier 1 workloads. A no compromise approach was to be taken to ensure that the platform on which our SAP Landscape is hosted performs consistently. It was also required that the Virtualization technology should perform equally well for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. The platform also required to be flexible and must adapt to the changing workloads.

With IBM PowerVM, both planned and unplanned downtime have reduced drastically. The platform provides peace of mind in terms of performance, reliability and availability. The administrators can spend less time on firefighting and more time of providing other services to improve overall value delivered to the organization

Shared Processer pools and active memory sharing are the features that are the hallmark of PowerVM. 

Shared Processer Pools allows PowerVM to automatically allocate processing power from a shared pool of processors based on the workload requirement. This enables better throughput and balancing of processing power as well as cost savings for processor-based licenses. An lpar can be provided an upper limit restricting lpar not to exceed the configured limit in case additional processing power is required from the shared processing pool. This also helps in restricting lpars from exceeding a certain processor count, especially where the application or workload license is based on processing power also ensuring compliance at all times.

Active Memory Sharing dynamically reallocates memory of running partitions based on changing workload demands. The memory for the pool is carved out from Physical memory and is made logical memory.  The said memory is not available to be assigned to partitions as dedicated memory. A min, max and desired as well as weight is assigned to the memory of each lpar to help hypervisor make a decision in case a condition where priority is to be given to a certain lapr to use the memory form shared pool.

A GUI version of VIOS would be a great plus for people moving from Intel-based hypervisors.

I have been using PowerVM for more than a decade now.

PowerVM is one of the most stable platform in the market. It is the virtualization platform of choice of high performance critical workloads.

One of the main reasons to procure PowerVM is scalability. These systems can scale up as well as scale out depending upon the model you choose. The performance that these systems deliver actually allows you to run much more demanding workloads than on any other intel based platform. We have about 824 users at the moment. We will probably increase usage over the next two years.

IBM technical support is top-notch. I'm very satisfied with them.

The initial setup is a bit complex and takes much longer to implement when compared to VMware and other hypervisors.

IBM smooth start services provides the complete initial setup for PowerVM. The Engineers deputed to implement the solution have very good understanding of the solution and guides the customer in every step of the way.

The license cost is bundled with IBM Power Systems as it is limited to RISC-based IBM systems only.

We evaluated VMware, AHV, and Hyper-V, but we chose IBM PowerVM.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM PowerVM an eight.

As a consultant, I primarily use IBM PowerVM for solutions related to SAP and Oracle.

The valuable feature of the solution is the technical aspects, focusing on elements like processor infinity. This involves automatically assigning resources and setting priorities. For instance, specific processes can be prioritized over others, ensuring that higher-priority tasks can utilize resources from lower-priority systems in case of limited resources.

SRM for site recovery is a feature that should be included. The only missing element is the disaster recovery tooling.

I have been using the solution for the past 20 years.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable, and all my customers using it are enterprises.

The support is great.

Positive

The initial setup is quite straightforward, using standard deployment tools. Automation is possible. While I'm more focused on planning as an architect, the setup can typically be completed within a few hours, often ready for use by lunchtime after the deployment request is made in the morning.

The solution is expensive. You have to usually purchase the hardware and acquire licenses for a specific portion. This includes some room for inbox growth. Additionally, you need to buy all the necessary software and maintenance on top of that.

If you have enterprise requirements and seek a stable platform, IBM proves to be a suitable choice for overall enterprise solutions. Overall, I rate it a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is in the banking industry. We utilize PowerVM in products such as IBM Content Manager. The platform is integrated into both development and production environments.

PowerVM excels in efficiently managing all systems and environments, including development, UI, and production. This comprehensive management is crucial for my organization. We use PowerVM in a product like IBM Content Manager and other corresponding products.

The pricing is expensive, which poses a financial challenge, especially in Argentina. We have a strong relationship with IBM, which aids decision-making in transitioning clients from mainframe to other platforms.

I have experience with PowerVM exclusively in the banking industry.

The platform is used as a piece of software in the middle of a whole project, and I'm not very familiar with the specifics.

I am not well-versed on scalability and therefore not the right person to answer this.

Customer service support is rated at nine. IBM provides strong support.

Positive

In Argentina, the setup and maintenance for alternative platforms are cheaper than for mainframes. Hence, we are considering migrations.

The initial setup is not difficult, and it's conducted by team members who specialize in IBM.

We required four team members for deployment. These were IBM specialized individuals.

The return on investment is substantial, though other platforms may offer a better ROI, primarily due to lower costs involved in setup and maintenance.

Pricing is a concern in Argentina due to the higher cost of mainframe solutions. This becomes a significant factor in migration decisions.

We are comparing mainframes with Nutanix and Intel microprocessors for server environments pertinent to our research and the company's needs.

While I recommend PowerVM for its capabilities, the cost is a significant deterrent. Overall, I would rate PowerVM an eight out of ten.

We use it to create logical partitions. 

The tool's performance is top-notch. 

The solution is quite pricey. 

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.