PowerVM Concepts
January 19, 2010.
Manta Technologies Inc. announces the availability of a new course, PowerVM Concepts. This course is intended for IT personnel who will operate, administer, or plan for the installation of an IBM Power System or BladeCenter server.
PowerVM is IBM's umbrella term for the collection of virtualization technologies that are available with its Power Systems family. The most important of these technologies is logical partitioning, or LPAR, which lets one physical system run multiple operating systems concurrently, including one or more copies of IBM i, AIX, and/or Linux.
The course begins with an overview of logical partitioning concepts and applications. You will learn the basic terminology and see how LPAR has evolved. The course then goes into greater detail on how specific resources are shared among partitions, including processors, memory, and I/O devices. Ways in which partitions can communicate with each other are also discussed.
Special considerations for sharing resource among partitions are covered next. In particular, partitions can use both direct I/O, in which physical devices are owned by the partition, and virtual I/O, in which resources are supplied by a host partition. Virtual I/O is particularly useful in allocating storage to a partition from DASD owned by another partition.
The last session of the course covers the techniques that are used to create and manage partitions. Two separate approaches are used by Power Systems. On smaller systems, partition management tasks are performed using the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM). Larger systems use a separate Hardware Management Console (HMC).
PowerVM Concepts takes approximately 3 hours to complete. Like all Manta courses, PowerVM Concepts is available in two ways. You can install the course on a PC or take the courses through MantaNow, Manta’s Internet-based delivery system. Prices start at $110 for a one-year, single-user MantaNow license or $179 for a CD license. A companion Student Reference Guide is available for $20.