What needs improvement with IBM PowerVM?

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.

Currently, all the necessary features are working fine for us. However, technical support could be improved, especially when seeking solutions to issues.

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.

Nothing, it’s almost perfect.

The pricing of the solution is on the higher side.

Automatic LPM is an area that is currently not available in IBM PowerVM, and it is a feature I want to see in the product's future releases. It was very expensive when I tried to use the tool's LPM functionality.

PowerVM is likely one of the most stable hypervisors available, albeit highly specialized. However, it is solely command-line based. When someone manages virtualization as a whole, they typically expect a graphical user interface (GUI) for configurations. This is the case for Hyper-V, XenServer, and VMware. But with PowerVM, you need to understand and memorize commands to operate the hypervisor. I believe PowerVM should have a GUI; that would be a significant improvement.

As I understand it, IBM sells all its hardware to Lenovo, and only PCs servers are managed by IBM. It's uncertain how much longer IBM will continue in this way, especially with the current trend of transitioning from on-premises to cloud and hybrid models. The market is evolving. Given this market shift, it's essential to identify areas for improvement. IBM has introduced the PowerVM Series, including Linux, which is a positive step. However, customers are already moving towards x86 servers due to cost considerations. The cost of PowerVM compared to x86 servers appears to be a significant factor.

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

The product's pricing could be less expensive compared to other competitors.

The solution is quite pricey.

IBM should review the price of this solution in my opinion; it is too high. Other than that, I can't think of any other ways to improve PowerVM as our customers are very satisfied with it, particularly with its stability and scalability.

PowerVM's platform build and performance could be improved.

IBM PowerVM could improve the price because it is expensive.

The only problem with the IBM system is improving its hardware licensing model. For example, when you procure a server with 40 physical codes, you must also procure licenses to activate the codes. In Dell or any system, you procure the hardware and have the full right to use the hardware. For IBM, it's different because when you procure a 40-code processor and have 40 physical codes, you only have a license to use 20. As a result, the 20 alert codes will always be in activated mode. Hence, the hardware licensing model could be improved because the licensing model is a bit different from the standard hardware procured.

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.

The solution should be advanced to fit with the container constantly.

Compared to VMWare, the price could be lower.

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 www.oracle.com to know more about the Oracle's 10-day failover licensing rule.

This solution is lacking the ability to have servers act as a cluster, such as in VMware. IBM has come out with a feature similar to VMware's vCenter but it is not as mature. They need to add LPM shared-nothing feature, such as in vMotion. IBM is a hardware company. They have always had the view of, why implement something in software that I can implement in hardware. The virtualized hardware can do many things whereas these other vendors are software vendors that can only work on hardware. However, this sometimes makes IBM less advanced in terms of software because they rely more on the hardware. That is why they need to look at VMware as a model for advancing their PowerVC offering to match VMware's vCenter. Similar to what Red Hat did. Red Hat Manager is very close to vCenter, they are trying to mimic the options.

Whenever you go to the virtualization, you may experience performance issues. They need to better cater to virtualization with respect to performance. I'm not saying I'm facing any performance issue, however. It's more of a theoretical concern, as people say you have to compromise with respect to the performance whenever you move to virtualization. The licensing could be better. The pricing and the licensing fees are very high with respect to the number of core licenses. So price factor on the Intel-based architecture is much less compared to IBM, for example. We have not confirmed their roadmap with respect to the cloud. Since IBM has acquired Red Hat, they may promote Red Hat for the cloud version. We don't know whether they are introducing AIX for their cloud platform as well or not. That we would love. Otherwise, we need to move to the Linux environment. In any case, they need to be more transparent with their plans for the cloud.

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

Currently, it's working fine. It's not really lacking too much in the way of features. If it could actually virtualize the entire platform it might be better. If you're having more than one virtualization technology, maybe there's a way to actually have less - one technology to run the data center and maybe one special virtualization for power. If it integrated with other platforms more effectively it might be better.

The performance should be improved. They should reduce the cost to purchase the hardware of the physical server.

The interface is not user-friendly in places, so it could use some improvement. If PowerVM were cheaper then it would better compete with VMware vCenter.

The price is high. I would like for them to add more automation features.

IBM now makes provides us with quality GUI tools to make the experience easier and successful. I don't have an issue with the current configuration or with the GUI. I worked on both with the team. I would like for IBM to be more focused on the cloud.

Any improvements that can be made in the interface will go a long way to helping us work better.

I would like to see an improvement in the management of the program.