Re: Centos 6 - What are you looking forward to?

[John R Pierce <pierce@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/04/11 11:59 AM, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> I'm looking forward to the new cgroups and KVM.  This will give it
>> >  some capabilities similar to AIX virtual partitions which can divvy up
>> >  CPUs at a fine resolution.
> Really? So IBM ported VM into native AIX? I missed that.

IBM Power servers since the Power4+ CPU (they are up to Power7 now) have 
hardware partitioning support, commonly known as LPAR.  LPAR can be 
divided in units of 1/10th of a CPU.   The software to manage this is 
now called PowerVM (its been called other names in the past, not all 
polite).

In addition, AIX 6.1 and newer have Workload Partitions (WPAR), which 
are similar to Solaris Zones, these allow subdividing an AIX install 
into an arbitrary number of apparently different systems that all share 
the same kernel.

LPAR plus VIOS (Virtual IO System, actually a stripped down 
preconfigured AIX system) corresponds to the Xen model, however the base 
hypervisor capability is built right into the CPU and IO hardware, VIOS 
just provides management and optional virtualized IO.  You can assign IO 
adapters directly to partitions, whereupon the partitions (VMs) run even 
if VIOS is shut down.  The newer Power6 and 7 servers have Ethernet 
adapters that provide each LPAR with its own hardware-virtualized 
ethernet adapter so you don't need a cage full of cards, or run all the 
networking through VIOS.


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