On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik@iki.fi wrote:
On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 03:33:10PM -0500, Kwan Lowe wrote:
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:11 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
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).
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Yes, it is some nice stuff...
In particular, having the hardware partitioning capability plays nice with Oracle licensing. Under KVM or Xen we still have to license the entire system. This probably won't change with the newer kvm, but one can hope.
It's kind of funny since OracleVM *is* Xen, and it's counted as "hardware partitioning" :)
-- Pasi
On the Linux side I would like to see how KSM (kernel memory merge) stacks up against memory compression on the Power7 side. Not sure if this made it into RHEL6, but hope springs eternal...
Storage management is always a big issue for me. AIX has some really great tools for managing disks. In Linux the LUN, block and fs layer are still relatively decoupled which gives an enormous amount of flexibility but certain types of changes require multiple commands on Linux.
On the desktop side I've been running RHEL6 as my primary environment since release. Transition was easy. My old kickstart files needed tweaking, but so far it's been a breeze.
What did you hve to tweak? I noticed the new use of the '%end' flag to mark the end of a section, and the new partitioning structure which names the LVM based volumes and groups things which contain the hostname. (This is a big deal if you have multiple virtual hosts on a machihe and want to compare their internal LVM's side by side from the virtualization server.)