IBM PowerVM offers LPAR - the hard partitioned VM which helps us to ensure our Oracle licensing compliance. If you use soft partitioning technologies like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V etc., there will be potentially a major licensing compliance issue.

IBM PowerHA is used for higher availability of our mission critical Oracle ERP system. This high availability feature is used subject to the Oracle's free "10-days failover" licensing policy. This allows us to have a full fledged fail-over cluster without any licensing impact for the secondary server.

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. 

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.

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. 

You can increase resources with it automatically. You can start with a very small capacity of the computer itself. You can have shared resources between multiple applications of the same virtual machines. It is like a shared pool between resources. It is not complicated like others on the market. First of all, consolidation, and second, it is efficient in resource utilization. It is a very elastic solution.

Overall, I like IBM's performance and stability.