IBM PowerVM Reviews

The solution is comprised of robust technology and is RISC architecture. The hardware is excellent. We never have any issues with it.

The stability is excellent. It's 99% stable. It offers amazing uptime.

The solution is very secure. It does a good job of protecting against cybersecurity threats. We feel safe in this environment.

IBM, as a principle itself, is available here in Pakistan, which is quite helpful. Technical support is great. The parts availability and their engineers, and even their support level at the backend, including a proper research team that can cater to any sort of the issues, are all available here.

They do have the high availability models, they have the HACMP, and they have the GPFS, and they have the Live Partition Mobility. The technology is advancing fast. 

If one can afford commercial offering with respect to the licensing cost and things, their research is going in the right direction in order to hopefully make it more affordable down the line. 

Whenever you go to the virtualization, you may experience performance issues. They need to better cater to virtualization with respect to performance. I'm not saying I'm facing any performance issue, however. It's more of a theoretical concern, as people say you have to compromise with respect to the performance whenever you move to virtualization.

The licensing could be better. The pricing and the licensing fees are very high with respect to the number of core licenses. So price factor on the Intel-based architecture is much less compared to IBM, for example. 

We have not confirmed their roadmap with respect to the cloud. Since IBM has acquired Red Hat, they may promote Red Hat for the cloud version. We don't know whether they are introducing AIX for their cloud platform as well or not. That we would love. Otherwise, we need to move to the Linux environment. In any case, they need to be more transparent with their plans for the cloud.

I've been dealing with the solution for a very long time. It's been more than a decade at this point.

The stability really is quite good. We never seem to have any issues whatsoever. The uptime is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Technical support has been excellent. I would rate them at a ten out of ten. They are extremely helpful and responsive, and they have a presence in our company, which makes it easy to not only get help but to get replacement parts as needed. They are excellent and we are extremely satisfied with the level of service they offer to customers. 

They have a very good Call Home feature. It's more proactive support. Sometimes if a system has some issue and they know beforehand, they will inform you that your system might face issues. They really try to be more proactive in their approach to support rather than the typical reactive support you might get.

When there wasn't any virtualization, there were a number of boxes that were pretty much the same at IBM. As the technology grew, with machines offering 24 GB memory or 64 GB, or 512GB, the processor limitation became smaller. Virtualization came in around 2005 and onwards, and things were now become less complex now in terms of setup. 

In terms of the number of boxes, they have reduced everything to only one or two boxes. You only have to cater to the maintenance of one box, or you have to manage many SLA contracts. And with respect to the data center, the power consumption is much less. 

Basically, previously, everything was much more complex. However, there has been a paradigm shift within the technology, and the complexity level is not as high as it once was.

The pricing is too high. there are other options on the market that are priced at less of a cost. IBM needs to begin to compete with them a bit more.

We are a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with IBM.

We are using the latest version of the solution, although I cannot speak to the exact version number.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten due to its very proactive support and robust hardware. They are excellent and we are very happy with them overall.

I'd likely recommend the solution, however, it depends. If I've been using IBM for a long time and needed to move to, for example, Linux, it would be a difficult task. There are certain skillsets needed. You'd need some sort of support model. IBM, however, supports SAP HANA very well. You just need to be clear on future plans. That said, I give full marks to IBM as it really is a great system. So long as you don't need the cloud just yet, it's great. 

Gatron Industries is rolling out one of the largest Digital Transformation program of the Country and require a platform that can provide industry leading Reliability, Availability and Scalability to host the Critical Tier 1 workloads. A no compromise approach was to be taken to ensure that the platform on which our SAP Landscape is hosted performs consistently. It was also required that the Virtualization technology should perform equally well for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. The platform also required to be flexible and must adapt to the changing workloads.

With IBM PowerVM, both planned and unplanned downtime have reduced drastically. The platform provides peace of mind in terms of performance, reliability and availability. The administrators can spend less time on firefighting and more time of providing other services to improve overall value delivered to the organization

Shared Processer pools and active memory sharing are the features that are the hallmark of PowerVM. 

Shared Processer Pools allows PowerVM to automatically allocate processing power from a shared pool of processors based on the workload requirement. This enables better throughput and balancing of processing power as well as cost savings for processor-based licenses. An lpar can be provided an upper limit restricting lpar not to exceed the configured limit in case additional processing power is required from the shared processing pool. This also helps in restricting lpars from exceeding a certain processor count, especially where the application or workload license is based on processing power also ensuring compliance at all times.

Active Memory Sharing dynamically reallocates memory of running partitions based on changing workload demands. The memory for the pool is carved out from Physical memory and is made logical memory.  The said memory is not available to be assigned to partitions as dedicated memory. A min, max and desired as well as weight is assigned to the memory of each lpar to help hypervisor make a decision in case a condition where priority is to be given to a certain lapr to use the memory form shared pool.

A GUI version of VIOS would be a great plus for people moving from Intel-based hypervisors.

I have been using PowerVM for more than a decade now.

PowerVM is one of the most stable platform in the market. It is the virtualization platform of choice of high performance critical workloads.

One of the main reasons to procure PowerVM is scalability. These systems can scale up as well as scale out depending upon the model you choose. The performance that these systems deliver actually allows you to run much more demanding workloads than on any other intel based platform. We have about 824 users at the moment. We will probably increase usage over the next two years.

IBM technical support is top-notch. I'm very satisfied with them.

The initial setup is a bit complex and takes much longer to implement when compared to VMware and other hypervisors.

IBM smooth start services provides the complete initial setup for PowerVM. The Engineers deputed to implement the solution have very good understanding of the solution and guides the customer in every step of the way.

The license cost is bundled with IBM Power Systems as it is limited to RISC-based IBM systems only.

We evaluated VMware, AHV, and Hyper-V, but we chose IBM PowerVM.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM PowerVM an eight.

We're using the solution primarily on power machines and the default specialization software, IVM Power. Our power machines are specifically used to run Oracle databases.

It's flexible to license virtual machines and power them with Oracle. If Oracle can not be virtualized in neutral, they actually say you pay a license for the whole box even if you want just one feature from Oracle. Our machine has got 60 CPUs, and that's just through a virtual machine. If I have an entire box and I put on VMware virtualization, Oracle makes me license the whole box even if my Oracle VM it was maybe just two CPUs out of maybe a box with 16 CPUs. Therefore, power machines seem to be more flexible, which is why we use the power machines for Oracle or Oracle databases.

Currently, it's working fine. It's not really lacking too much in the way of features.

If it could actually virtualize the entire platform it might be better. If you're having more than one virtualization technology, maybe there's a way to actually have less - one technology to run the data center and maybe one special virtualization for power. If it integrated with other platforms more effectively it might be better.

I've been using the solution for a decade. It's been ten years now.

It's easy to actually manage all the hardware for Power VM.

It's scalable. Whenever we buy another product other than hardware, it's easily integrated into the virtualization software that we download. 

We have about 50-75 internal users on the solution currently that handle reports, etc. However, we have a subscriber base of 10 million.

We do plan to increase the usage in the future.

The technical support is okay. They read all of our messages or SMS. We're very satisfied with their level of support and find them knowledgeable and responsive.

We've been using this solution for quite some time now. It's been ten years. 

We've been actually using IBM side by side with Intel machines which are Lenovo and HP. 

For the power machine, the setup is not that complex. We have got 100 percent vendor support. We find that if you buy a new machine, the item vendor actually gives us 100 percent support in setting it up and also in showing us how it is run.

Deployment times depend on when the deployment is done. We're looking at deploying the hardware and then the software. In most cases, it takes about a week or two. It is a maximum of two weeks to set up everything.

The solution is being maintained by a team of 850.

We have support from our vendor that assists us. 

The current Power VM that we have, has an upgrade from a previous solution. The integration was within Power VM itself.

I don't know what the licensing costs are. It's not part of my department.

We're IBM customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'd recommend this solution. It's a great product and they offer great support.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for virtualization to consolidate workloads efficiently.

The most valuable features in this solution are you do not get degradation in the performance like you could get in other solutions. There is a physical adapter that is better than a virtual one and you can assign adapters to a VM. The IBM Live Partition Mobility (LPM) feature lets you keep partitions running during data moves between the source and clusters. When using this solution with VMware you have the option in the vMotion not to share anything, such as storage or servers and you can have them on different platforms. 

This solution is lacking the ability to have servers act as a cluster, such as in VMware. IBM has come out with a feature similar to VMware's vCenter but it is not as mature. They need to add LPM shared-nothing feature, such as in vMotion.

IBM is a hardware company. They have always had the view of, why implement something in software that I can implement in hardware. The virtualized hardware can do many things whereas these other vendors are software vendors that can only work on hardware. However, this sometimes makes IBM less advanced in terms of software because they rely more on the hardware. That is why they need to look at VMware as a model for advancing their PowerVC offering to match VMware's vCenter. Similar to what Red Hat did. Red Hat Manager is very close to vCenter, they are trying to mimic the options.

I have been working with this solution for approximately 17 years.

This solution's stability is good. 

There are issues with VMware when it comes to scalability. For example, when using SAP HANA with Power or VMware you are going to have a lot of restrictions. In IBM PowerVM, the design and memory are different, and the latency is much more. It is even beyond the maximum latency accepted by SAP, they do not have such restrictions. We have found in VMware and SAP HANA used to use four terabytes but now have six terabytes. This solution supports up to 28 terabytes.

The technical support is good.

The setup is easier than VMware. In VMware, you have to restore the vSAN tool, install the ESXi, register your ESXi, and install the license. With IMB PowerVM you do not need to do all of that. You are able to create your VM from the beginning, you do not need to do the full infrastructure set up first and then create your VM.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as VMware vSphere and SAP HANA and I have found IBM PowerVM is better than VMware. For example, if you compare SAP HANA with IBM PowerVM versus SAP HANA with VMware, according to SAP HANA themselves you lose 10% of performance if you work on VMware. With IBM PowerVM all the workload is done in the hardware, it is not a software layer like in VMware.

I rate IBM PowerVM ten out of ten.

Overall, I like IBM's performance and stability.

Compared to VMWare, the price could be lower.

I have been using it for five years.

It is a stable solution.

Technical support is fine.

It took about one day to setup. We can't compare with VMWare because VMWare can be setup in one click.

IBM PowerVm has a high cost.