Dynamic Logical Partitioning for Linux on POWER

An anonymous reader writes "Logical partitioning provides POWER processor-based servers with the capability to do server consolidation and optimize system resources. Dynamic logical partitioning enhances this capability by providing control of the allocation of the resources without impacting the logical partitions availability. Linux on POWER supports dynamic LPAR for changes to physical I/O, virtual I/O, and processor resources."

Comments

Cool, but still buggy

[Kris2k]

I've worked on it on a few times, and its still a bit buggy, but IBM seems to never cease to amaze me by pulling-out new patches on a daily/weekly basis. With time, this technology will perfect itself, and when it will, it will really rock, for now, I'd still go with a BladeCenter + SAN.

Re:Cool, but still buggy

[Kris2k]

Oh, and an after-thought:

Redundancy is achieved with multiple independent subsystems

Well, in the case of LPAR, when your host OS decides to pull a quickie on you, you find yourself on a standstil with an entire company of 100+ users without their apps running. I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of the iSeries admin in that case.

Re:Cool, but still buggy

[atomicdoggy]

An LPAR doesn't have a "host" operating system. The partitioning is done in hardware (each LPAR has it's own installation of the operating system).

Power Rocks

[as400tek]

Then entire world will move to POWER in the next 10 years. POWER 5 is where it's going folks. Great IBM Hardware is paving the way for the great OSs of the world to run like champs. I have been an AS/400 now iSeries Admin for over 15 years and POWER/5 is awesome. Good to see some Slashdot coverage on the topic of POWER. IBM is still trying to figure out what to do with LINUX and maybe this is it. Will have to wait and see what happens next.

Re:Power Rocks

[DannyKumamoto]

"SO i _seriously_ doubt "the entire world" will be using power in 10 years. They can be happy if the keep their market share."

With PS3, Xbox 360 and Revolution containing some flavor of POWER5 (Cell certainly has inherited POWER5 technologies), I'm pretty sure "the entire world" would have these powerful capabilities. Unlike workstations and PCs, these game machines won't be so hacker friendly but then I doubt if most people of "the entire world" would care less....

Xen

[SumDog]

This type of technology has been available from IBM for years. I remember those old AS/400 machines during my undergrad that had removable boards that you could hot swap which contained extra processors. One of my professors told me about when he took operating systems, he made his OS on an IBM machine and was able to use one of the six processors available in his own little virtual space without interfering with anyone else's simulations.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like IBM has placed into hardware what systems like Xen currently does in software, allocating virtual space for different operating systems to share resources and execute simultaneously.

LIcensing?

[Necron69]

I found this interesting. Try this on the bits for the RHEL4 packages:

for i in *.rpm; do rpm -qilp $i |grep -i license; done

Size: 2547252 License: IBM Corp.
(lots of output deleted)

11 "IBM Corp." licenses.
1 IBM Common Public License (CPL)
1 GPL

Open Source it ain't. I'd rather use Xen.

- Necron69

It's all about management

[Anonymous Coward]

AIX and power hardware has always been about management and stability not nifty features.

What about the concurrent firmware upgrade feature that has just been rolled out as promised in the latest power5/HMC code

- anyone else ever tried firmware updating 7 boxes some running multiple partitions at once WITHOUT disruption to the patitions in question?

I just have - nice little feature!