IBM taunts Sun, HP and VMware with $40 PowerVM hypervisor

It's the tools that count

So we are in a virtualisation arms race. I can't speak for other vendors, but this appears to give IBM the jump on Sun ... for now and at a price.

But while the dog-standing-on-its-hind-legs tricks are great, and in different guises the offerings are fairly similar with vendors leap-frogging each other for the bleeding edge, the management tools are lagging far behind. What customers want is a control bridge where they can have a unified view of their virtualised datacentre from all the different vendors (VMWare, Sun, IBM, EMC, HDS, HP, the list goes on). And they want to be able to say "It's month end, please turn the knob to 11 for billing".

So is this unified view of the virtualised datacentre going to come from the traditional enterprise management sources like CA, BMC, Tivoli, or from the newer datacentre automation outfits like BladeLogic or Enigmatec?

IBM Hypervisor available long before 2004

"The Standard Edition APV was basically just IBM's hypervisor that has been available since 2004". IBM's Hypervisor has been available on System i (OS/400) since the 1990s and on system p(unix, linux) since 2001 (and of course since 1960s on the mainframe precursors to system Z). The converged POWER Hypervisor that runs on both i & p has been selling since 2004 but it is incorrect to say IBM's Hypervisor has been available only since 2004.

Good to see you mention IBM's leadership in virtualization as opposed to a recent Economist article "The rise of the Hypervisor" which didn't mention IBM at all.

Sounds tasty

But should have been called Power Advanced Riskless Information Systems Hypervisory IBM-Linux-Transitive ON! - or Yo bitch for short.

What's the big deal?

Sun's HV slices and dices a 64-way CPU now with bigger and badder on the way.

ON top of that, Sun's logical partitioning software is FREE. F. R. E. E. IBM's is nothing more than a marketing machine. And what about the cost of this crappy Power6 chip with minor threading/chip? It's a bloody fortune.

The only thing that Sun's SPARC LDOMs software doesn't do and that everyone else's does do is live OS migration. They are fully aware of this. It would be my

guess that one can expect this showing up in their firmware soon.

IBM's hardware is mediocre with lousy through-put, expensive services, and awful OS support. LINUX management of 256GB. Puh-lease. Are they running Solaris on this baby? With support contracts kicking back to Sun? That'd be another story.

Sun does have some nice hardware

BUT ... Believe it or not, IBM has some nice hardware as well w/ some cool software that comes with it. The one reason I'm looking forward to the Live Partition Mobility because it would make my downtimes much easier. Matter of fact in a few weeks we need to migrate a server to a new SUN M5000 and unfortunately have to spend a weekend doing this. Lukily it is part of a VCS cluster so not as much downtime to the users (just an inconvenience to me), but bouncing them a few times is a royal PAIN!!

For your info, when you do purchase a pSeries box, the partioning comes FREE. It's just the extra's you have to pay for like VIO.

IBM >>>>> Sun

I seem to recall that Sun LDOMS do not have the ability to dynamically move memory on the fly.

nor can unused cpu cycles be ceded back to a shared pool for use by other partitions, maximising efficiency.

and it only runs on Solaris 10, and on limited hardware, whereas IBM supports partitioning of multiples OS's across the full range of hardware.

and then there is the partition and apllication mobility features.

Seems to me that the IBM APV or PowerVM offering is way ahead of Sun.