IBM Virtualization Manager 1.2 beta

Hot on the heels of the System p AVE beta, is news we’ve opened up the beta program for the IBM Virtualization Manager 1.2.

The Virtualization Manager helps manage both physical and virtualization resources for the IBM Systems Director. This beta release specifically deals with the resources and relationships that can be managed from the Hardware Management Console (HMC), Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) and Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).

The new release also includes enhanced storage integration and wizards for the creation & modification of virtual servers for POWER, as well as well as setup and deployment of select Xen environments and provides for system templates.

Perhaps more interestingly, two new major extensions/functions are included, the Image Manager and Availability Manager. Image Manager offers image management, creation and cloning for select server systems, and Availability Manager offers relocation and continuous availability on select server systems.

[Edit 5/2/07] If you’d like to participate, please discuss with your IBM rep. or comment here and I’ll make sure the comment is passed on to the enrollment coordinator.

LPAR Monitor for System p5 updated

If you downloaded the Austin Briefing centers graphical LPAR Monitor I mentioned in one of my first blog entries, please sure you get the latest version which includes some useful updates.

This developerworks article from Ken Milberg makes a complementary detail piece. It’s the first of a three part paper that covers Optimizing AIX 5L performance, and the first part covers monitoring your CPU.

PAVE open beta

Here is a new twist to the “old” server consolidation story, literally.

We’ve opened up the beta program for the IBM System p Application Virtual Environment or p AVE. What p AVE does allow the consolidation x86 Linux Workloads on System P Servers.

You can take advantage of the Advanced Power Virtualization to move your Linux binaries from older Intel servers to just one(or more) Power based servers.

One of the things we want to get out of the beta program is some real world performance feedback. Since System p AVE will allow most x86 Linux binaries to run unmodified and take advantage of the Power based servers not just for execution speed and throughput that many Linux apps will experience, but allow you to make power, cooling and space savings by consolidating x86 server footprints onto System p and switching the old servers off.

From the beta announce:

“Applications should run, without any change to the application and without having to predefine that application to the Linux on POWER operating system with p AVE installed. The system will “just know” the application is a Linux x86 binary at runtime and run it automatically in a p AVE environment. Behind the scenes, p AVE creates a virtual x86 environment and file structure, and executes x86 Linux applications by dynamically translating and mapping x86 instructions and system calls to a POWER Architecture™ processor-based system. It uses caching to optimize performance, so an application’s performance can actually increase the longer it runs.”

Here is some more detail in a recent IBM p ave Redpaper

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/linux/systempave.html.

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=242284

For those that don’t or can’t take part in the beta, IBM intends to make this capability generally available in second half of 2007.