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.