As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems. In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron. The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions – what everyone else calls a virtual machine – has better performance. The exact nature of that performance improvement is not clear as we go to press. IBM is also supporting DRAM-based persistent memory – which does not mean Intel’s Optane persistent memory but rather NVDIMMs which mix flash and DRAM – so VMs can be stored persistently on that memory and therefore system restarts and VM reloads can happen a lot quicker. IBM has also enhanced virtual network interface card (vNIC) and related Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV). Here are the tweaks IBM has made on the I/O front with PowerVM V3.1.1 .
Source: https://www.itjungle.com/2019/10/14/systems-software-stack-tweaked-for-power-systems/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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