On Mar 4, 2011, at 12:11 PM, John R Pierce 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). > > 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. > Wow, thats awesome, thanks for the John. - aurf