Anyone using Advanced POWER Virtualization? 1

[NDK]

We are looking to Micro-partitioning an 8-way and a 4-way. Are these systems too small?

 

[Gloups]

I use a 8 way P570 whith 32 Gb of memory and i have 9 partitions on it including a VIOS partition. All works fine for month but it depends on what you want to do with it.

 

[trifo]

To use micro-partitioning, you have to buy license for, and activate Advanced Virtualization feature for yout p5 server. Do you have such license?

--Trifo

 

[unixfreak]

We use micropartitioning on a few p510 with 2 CPUs

 

[NDK]

Thanks, yes we plan on purchasing the Advanced POWER virtualization. It sounds like this is good plan.

Thanks for the help!

Nathan

 

[p5wizard]

Be advised that if you plan to use VIOS, you *should* ideally (if you plan to run production systems on the VIOS-clients) plan for two VIOS partitions, and those two already use up 1 processor between them. So a 4way may be on the small side.

However, if you can live with a single point of failure for all your VIOS-clients, then one VIOS partition may be enough: so that would only eat up 0.5 processor, which still leaves 3.5 processor for your VIOS-client partitions.

Of course if you have enough PCI slots and network & disk adapters (which I doubt on a 4way - but it is possible with additional IO-drawers), you can micro-partition without the VIOS overhead. Of course every partition then needs its own disks and adapters, so that option would probably be even costlier to run that the VIOS setup.

Plan on sticking enough memory in the boxes, because there is quite some memory overhead per LPAR, also virtual IO adapters consume extra memory for the Power Hypervisor I believe. There is an LPAR validation tool somewhere on the IBM site which can estimate memory consumption for your p5 boxes. If you can't find the tool, let me know and I'll look it up for you.


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[hfaix]

I run vios on a couple of 520's.

I only run one vio on these small machines because of the cpu cost needed for a second vio. Yes, if I lose a VIOS server ( which I haven't in over a year ) it would be nice to have a second, but VIO Servers crash about as often as your AIX servers crash..... they don't. I can see where on an 8 way you might want to you two vios, because you have the cpu's to give up.

 

[Aixexplore]

Agree with p5wizard