[CentOS] Centos 6 - What are you looking forward to?
John R Pierce
pierce at hogranch.com
Fri Mar 4 20:11:19 UTC 2011
On 03/04/11 11:59 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us 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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