[CentOS] Centos 6 - What are you looking forward to?

Mon Mar 7 20:46:38 UTC 2011
James Nguyen <james at callfire.com>

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:11 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> 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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This is why I'm not totally impressed with virtualization today, but
I've used it ions ago in enterprise solutions. =)  There's a reason
why IBM solutions are so expensive sides the amount of people they
staff on projects.  You also get technology that the industry never
new existed.

-- 
James H. Nguyen
CallFire :: Systems Architect
http://www.callfire.com
1.949.625.4263