On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:11 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at 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). [informative text snipped] 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. 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.