7/28/2019 IBM PowerVM Virtualization Technology on IBM POWER7 Systems http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ibm-powervm-virtualization-technology-on-ibm-power7-systems 1/43 89 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor New York, NY 10003 www.TheEdison.com 212.367.7400 White Paper IBM PowerVM Virtualization Technology on IBM POWER7 Systems A Comparison of PowerVM and VMware vSphere (4.1 & 5.0) Virtualization Performance
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7/28/2019 IBM PowerVM Virtualization Technology on IBM POWER7 Systems
Edison: IBM – Virtualization Performance White Paper Page 1
Executive Summary
Today’s business organizations need to rein in IT costs without sacrificing performance,
security, reliability, and flexibility. A new era has emerged in which it is now possible,
through intelligent and strategic use of new and/or advanced technology, to achieve
breakthrough economics, considerably reducing the cost of delivering the workloads
central to a business’s operation.
IBM has aggressively been making pioneering strides in IT infrastructure, harnessing
trends and innovation to deliver top-notch functionality with great efficiency for
considerable data center savings. IBM's Smarter Computing initiative has helped many
forward-thinking organizations design, tune, and manage their IT infrastructures to
make them designed for data, tuned to the task, and managed in the cloud.
A cornerstone of this initiative is a move toward architectures optimized for specific
purposes and built around deep domain knowledge. The goals here are to reduce
deployment times for systems from months to days, improve performance with
utilization rates of up to 90 percent, and to reduce floor space, power consumption,
labor, and total cost per workload. The key technology advancement harnessed to
achieve these goals is server consolidation through virtualization.
Using virtualization to consolidate data center servers has become an integral
component of how successful companies design their IT systems. However, the majorityof businesses fall far short of realizing the full potential of server consolidation. On
average, consolidation ratios are only around six virtual machines (VMs) per physical
server. Even world-class organizations are only consolidating at a ratio of about 18 to 1
at best. Much higher VM densities are possible without degrading system performance,
significantly reducing data center consolidation expenses and yielding a considerable
economic advantage to organizations.
Under the banner of “Power is performance redefined,” IBM has introduced an
impressive profile of servers with the 2010 launch and 2011 release of Power Systems
servers and blades. These products are based on the IBM POWER7 processorarchitecture, ranging from 2-socket to 32-socket with up to 256 cores.
To evaluate what IBM’s virtualization technology can offer clients, Edison Group was
engaged to help provide a clear understanding of the benefits that can be seen when
organizations implement virtualization technology as part of their IT environment. IBM
virtualization technologies support a server virtualization ratio of 1,000 to 1, outdoing
competitors and providing for massive data center consolidation. Clients using
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POWER7 systems and PowerVM virtualization technology achieve higher operational
savings by using greater VM density. Many of the advantages stem from the fact that
PowerVM technology is built directly into the firmware of all Power Systems servers.
The widely-deployed VMware vSphere and other x86-based virtualization products aretypically third-party software add-ons, sold and installed separately.
This technical white paper presents benchmark results showing greater VM
consolidation ratios than demonstrated in previous benchmarks and demonstrating the
extent of the performance lead that PowerVM virtualization technologies deliver over
x86-based add-on virtualization products. The tests, running two workload benchmarks
of different consolidation ratios on POWER7 processor-based and comparable Intel-
based systems, demonstrate the exceptional performance and scalability of PowerVM
virtualization technologies compared to VMware vSphere1 on an x86-based platform.
Key findings include the following: PowerVM technology on an IBM Power 750 system performs up to 131 percent
better than VMware vSphere in whole core configuration with a consolidation ratio
of 32 to 1.
PowerVM on Power 750 outperforms VMware by up to 525 percent when running
multiple VMs and workloads, despite the test Intel x86 system (Westmere-EX)
containing a greater number of cores (40 versus 32).
PowerVM technology on a 4-socket IBM Power 750 system demonstrated linear
scaling, with 50 percent more absolute throughput performance compared to
VMware vSphere.
In terms of throughput performance, vSphere 5 demonstrated no improvement over
vSphere 4.1 update 1; in fact, it demonstrated slightly lower performance overall.
The benchmark results clearly reveal that PowerVM virtualization technology on
POWER7 processor-based platforms offers greater performance than that offered by
VMware vSphere on Intel x86 platforms. They enable high consolidation ratios, broader
scalability, and increased flexibility for a far superior virtualization solution. PowerVM
virtualization technology on POWER7 processor-based platforms not only uses system
resources in shared processor mode more efficiently, but also delivers superior
performance when resources are over-committed with a higher consolidation ratio.Together they establish PowerVM virtualization technology as the consolidation system
of choice for organizations wishing to realize the full advantages of greater VM density.
1 For results of comparison benchmarks with VMware vSphere 5, see the Addendum to this study.
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The Business Value of Virtualization
Inefficiencies have cropped up in data center operations as applications, workloads, and
data have multiplied. These include: underutilization of server processor capacity,
memory bottlenecks that restrict performance, server sprawl and its related difficulties
in deployment and management, as well as higher energy bills from excessive power
demands. Such inefficiencies increase costs, both through expenditures for equipment
purchases and licensing, as well as through greater demands on administrative staff
resources, etc.
Virtualization technologies allow IT organizations to consolidate workloads running on
multiple operating systems and software stacks, and to dynamically allocate platform
resources to meet specific business and application requirements. Server virtualization,the foundation platform for today’s data center, is quickly reaching maturity. More than
half of business server workloads are now deployed on virtual machines. According to
IDC, 2 virtualization has become the default build for new server installations, driving
down costs and establishing the foundation for more efficient and flexible configurations
and technology platforms. The average size of virtualized workloads increased threefold
between 2006 and 2009. The performance of virtualization is a critical factor to realize
success of server pools and cloud computing (and is also a key component in IBM’s
roadmap in its Smarter Computing initiative).
Well-implemented virtualization solutions may be employed to: Reduce hardware expenditures by consolidating multiple environments, including
underutilized servers, and systems with varied and dynamic resource requirements.
Reduce costs for power and cooling, floor space, hardware maintenance, and
software licensing.
Grow and shrink resources dynamically according to business needs.
Deploy new workloads through provisioning VMs or new systems rapidly to meet
changing business demands.
Develop and test applications in secure, independent domains while allocating
production to its own domain on the same system.
Transfer live workloads to support server migrations, balance system load, or avoid
planned downtime that can otherwise adversely impact productivity.
Control server sprawl, reducing system management costs.
2 The Value of Memory-Dense Servers: IBM’s System x MAX5 for its eX5 Server Family , March 2010, IDC
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Despite this, the majority of businesses fall far short of seizing upon the full potential of
server consolidation. Their average consolidation ratio hovers around six VMs per
server,3 yet economic advantages from data center consolidation increase significantly at
much higher VM densities. By increasing the consolidation ratio per system, businessescan reduce capital expenditures and operational costs by reducing the number of
systems in their data center or IT organization.
IBM’s Smarter Computing systems, which allow for greater VM density without
degrading system performance, can deliver considerable economic advantages to
organizations using them. This study examines the performance and scaling aspects of
PowerVM and VMware vSphere virtualization at high consolidation ratios (32:1 and
40:1) across two different commonly employed industry benchmarks (AIM7 and TpoX).
The case of 40:1 consolidation ratio — “five virtual machines per core”— was mapped to
achieve a higher amount of compression than the client deployment consolidation ratiosurveyed in 2010.4
3 According to a recent Aberdeen Group report, Best-in-Class Practices for Virtualizing Microsoft Applications ,
August 2010, even the best-in-class organizations in the study consolidate at only an 18:1 ratio.4 http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/121510-vmware-server.html
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Benchmark Comparison Study:
PowerVM vs. VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1
AIM7 Benchmark
AIM7 is a well-known open source benchmark. It is widely used by UNIX computer
system vendors to compare system performance. It comprises three pre-defined tests
suites (compute, multi-user, and database). Each suite is a mix of compute-, memory-
and I/O-intensive atomic tests covering a wide range of operations. AIM7 also stresses
the guest operating system’s kernel performance within virtualized environments. The
testing described in this paper used the compute server test suite.
Methodology
For AIM7 scaling tests, all 32 available cores were used to scale from one to 32 virtual
machines on both platforms. The Power Linux version used on PowerVM virtualization
technology was SuSE 11 SP1, while SuSE 11 SP1 x86_64 version was used as guest OS on
VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1. (Configuration details of the tests are in the appendices.)
Results
AIM7 was scaled in one, two, four, eight, 16, and 32 virtual machines (each virtualmachine having one virtual processor). Scaling was close to linear on both the POWER7
processor-/PowerVM technology-based systems and the Intel/VMware vSphere 4.1
update 1 platforms. The tests were run at close to 100 percent utilization to measure the
absolute performance of AIM7 in each VM configuration.
POWER7 processor-/PowerVM technology-based systems demonstrated more than two
times (110 percent) better performance than Intel/VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 at one,
two, four, eight, and 16 VM configurations, while at 32 VM, PowerVM technology
demonstrated a 115 percent advantage (Figure 1).
NOTE: The VM configuration and the test results can be found in the tables
following the graphs for each test in this paper, starting with Figure 1.
Table 1 shows the details on throughput and CPU utilization for each configuration. In
this test, the VMs on both platforms were configured as close to identically as possible.
In the case of PowerVM, each logical partitioning (LPAR) was given one core
entitlement, one vCPU (virtual CPU), and 3 GB RAM; in the case of VMware vSphere 4.1
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PowerVM and VMware vSphere technologies differ in the way they map a physical
processor to a virtual processor. PowerVM virtualization technology maps all four
threads of a core (SMT4, introduced with POWER7 processor-based systems) to a virtualprocessor. So, PowerVM technology leveraged POWER7 SMT4 technology with one
vCPU configuration. VMware vSphere maps one of the two threads of a core (Intel’s HT
technology) to a virtual processor. Therefore, VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 was not
able to leverage Intel’s HT technology with one vCPU configuration per VM.
The tests on VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 were thus repeated with two vCPU per VM
configuration in order to observe performance with two threads running on a core.
Because the VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 VM was reconfigured to have two virtual
processors, the test team wished to ensure that each VM was assigned a core to matchwith PowerVM technology. So, CPU affinity was used to assign two threads (the
primary and secondary thread of a core) to two virtual processors of each VM.5 This set
of tests was a fair comparison with PowerVM test results, since it allowed the workload
to consume all the capacity of the system in a manner similar to POWER/PowerVM
technology. The results of the second test are shown below (Figure 2).
The second test results with two vCPU reveal that results for the Intel Xeon processor
running VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 had improved, but still lagged behind
POWER/PowerVM results. In each of the tests, PowerVM technology still demonstrated
up to 59 percent higher throughput performance than Intel 7560 /VMware vSphere 4.1
update 1, at close to 100 percent utilization.
Power 750/PowerVM technology demonstrated higher AIM7 throughput performance
than the HP system with Intel 7560 processor using VMware technologies. Many factors
contributed to this superior performance, including: PowerVM technology efficiency,
IBM POWER7 SMT4 technology, and IBM POWER7 processor core frequency
(specifically, the fact that IBM POWER7 technology supports higher frequency with the
same processor capacity than does Intel Xeon technology).
5 That is, one vCPU of a VM was assigned to an even number logical processor, and a second vCPU of a VM
was assigned to an odd number logical processor. For example, the first vCPU of the first VM was assigned
to logical cpu0, and the second vCPU of the first VM was assigned to logical cpu1, so that all the primary
and secondary threads of cores were consumed by the workload running on that VM.
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TPoX Benchmark
TPoX (Transaction Processing over XML) is an application-level “XML database”
benchmark based on a financial application scenario. It simulates an actual applicationthat performs queries, inserts, updates, and deletes in a concurrent multi-user workload.
It is an XML OLTP benchmark using data-oriented XML structures, very large numbers
of relatively small XML documents (1 kb to 20 kb), short read/write transactions, and a
high degree of concurrency. It models a security-trading scenario that uses a real-world
XML Schema (FIXML). TPoX is an open-source benchmark developed by IBM in
collaboration with Intel and others. It is available at:
http://tpox.sourceforge.net/tpoxresults.htm 6
A database application, TPoX stresses CPU, memory, and storage I/O; however, in a
multi-VM environment, this benchmark also stresses the virtualization infrastructuresupporting these resources on both platforms.
Methodology
The next set of tests was conducted using the TPoX benchmark. These tests involve a
higher degree of processor contention, using a VM-to-core ratio of 5:1. Because of this
increased ratio, the shared pool configuration was reduced in these tests to eight cores
on both platforms, in order to limit the maximum VMs to 40 on each platform.
The TPoX benchmark is I/O-intensive and its performance is dependent on storage
performance. Identical storage subsystems were used on both of the VM platforms. Alogical array (12 spindles) with RAID5 was used to host four VMs on each in order to
avoid I/O blender 7. Both the data and logs for the database are configured on the same
set of disks in order to simplify the configuration for hosting 40 VMs.
Each VM used a 1 GB database in order to match up with each VM’s CPU (0.2 core) and
memory capacity (3 GB). A single-tier TPoX configuration was chosen for each VM
where the client and the database reside in the same VM.
The VM configuration has multiple options on both PowerVM and VMware vSphere
technologies 8
6 Reference: http://nativexmldatabase.com/2011/03/04/new-tpox-benchmark-results-available/ 7 http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/102510-burning-questions-virtualization-storage.html 8 On PowerVM, each VM was configured with 0.2 core/one vCPU/uncapped mode/3 GB RAM with shared
processor pool allocated with one, two, four and eight cores (up to one socket) for five-VM, 10-VM, 20-
VM, and 40-VM, respectively. There were three dedicated LPARs configured to consume the other three
sockets on Power 750 system. On VMware, two sets of configurations were used; the first set includes a
configuration where each VM was given one vCPU/20 percent of a core — 452 MHz limit/4 GB RAM, and
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Results
The database for each VM on each of the platforms was populated with the same
configuration set. The transaction rate for populating the database is shown in Table 3.
Power
750/PowerVM
HP DL580G7/ VMware
vSphere 4.1 update 1 1vCPU
Order (inserts per second) 1,591 746
Custacc (inserts per second) 684 271
Table 3. TPoX Database Populated Rate for First Configuration Set
As these results indicate, the performance rate for populating the database is two to two-
and-a-half times better for POWER/PowerVM technology than with Intel Xeon 7560
/VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1. Figure 3, below, presents results demonstrating that thetransactions throughput performance on POWER/PowerVM technology is as much as
three times better than Intel Xeon 7560 /VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1. 9
Figure 3. TPoX Benchmark Results in 40:1 Consolidation Ratio
Table 4 presents detailed information on the total number of TPoX users used in each
test, pool utilization, throughput, and VM configuration for each tests.
advanced shared panel settings that included 1) hyperthread core sharing and, 2) scheduling affinity set to
0-15 (logical processors). The idea was to run five VMs on a single core; with five vCPUs the entire coreshould be utilized in hyperthreading mode. 9 Because processor utilization in the first VMware configuration set made it harder to report total
percentage, in this case pool utilization was used. With a single virtual processor per VM, it would not be
realistic to map to either a primary or secondary thread per VM. For example, in the five-VM test, where the
goal was to use 20 percent of a core, binding a VM could be done either to a primary or to a secondary
thread, in which case some VMs would be running on primary and others would running on secondary.
Thus, the decision was made to use the pool to assign cpu0 to cpu15 for all the tests. At a lower number of
VMs, VMware used around 20 percent from each of the cores in the pool; at 40 VMs the pool utilization
matched with PowerVM as it is shown in Figure 3.
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Power 750/PowerVM
HP DL580G7/ VMware
vSphere 2vCPU
Order (inserts per second) 1591 1176
Custacc (inserts per second) 684 333
Table 5A. TPoX Database Populated Rate for Second Set (2 vCPU) of Configuration
A second configuration set on VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 was added in order to
restrict the VMs to run within the core, similar to the PowerVM virtualization
configuration.10 Again, the database of each VM in this new configuration on VMware
vSphere 4.1 update 1 was populated. The transaction rate for populating the database isshown in Table 5A. The results of this set of tests were compared with results for
PowerVM technology, as shown in Figures 6, A and B.
POWER/PowerVM still retained 2.3 times better performance than HP Intel/VMware
vSphere 4.1 update 1 technologies, even with reconfiguration using CPU affinity
(VMware Scheduling Affinity group) on VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1. CPU utilization
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These previously-published results were better than what was achieved in tests using
the HP Intel Xeon 7560 system described here. The difference in these results could be
attributed to differences in storage subsystem, database size, execution of a largenumber of software images such as guest OS, database middleware, etc. Most
significant, however, is that the tests described here were conducted in a virtualized
environment using VMware vSphere, which adds overhead in comparison to a non-
virtualized environment.
Summary of Results
Overall, PowerVM virtualization technology demonstrated superior performance over
VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 in two different configurations, each configuration
covering two different virtual machine densities featuring high resource contention. Asdemonstrated using the AIM7 and TPoX benchmarks, the difference in throughput
performance was quite considerable throughout, ranging from 50 percent better to as
much as 200 percent better on PowerVM technology.
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PowerVM Virtualization Technology
With IBM POWER processor-based systems and IBM PowerVM virtualization
technologies, an organization can consolidate applications and servers usingpartitioning and virtualized system resources to achieve a more flexible and dynamic IT
infrastructure. PowerVM delivers robust virtualization for IBM i, IBM AIX, and Linux
environments on IBM POWER processor-based systems. The POWER Hypervisor is
integrated as part of the system firmware and supports multiple operating
environments on a single system. PowerVM virtualization technology offers the
flexibility of combining dedicated and shared resources in the same partition. IBM
Power Systems servers and PowerVM technology are designed to deliver a dynamic
infrastructure that can help reduce costs, manage risk, and improve service levels.
allow a single partition to act as a completely separate AIX, IBM i, or Linux operating
environment. Partitions can be assigned either dedicated or shared processor resources.
With shared resources, PowerVM virtualization technology can automatically adjust
pooled processor resources across multiple operating systems, borrowing processing
power from idle partitions to handle high transaction volumes in other partitions.
PowerVM technology’s Micro-Partitioning supports up to 10 dynamic logical partitions
per processor core. Depending upon the Power server, up to 1,000 independentvirtualized servers can be run on a single physical Power server — each virtualized
server with its own fractional processor share, memory, and I/O resources. These
partitions can be assigned at a granularity of 1/100 th of a core. Consolidating systems
with PowerVM technology can reduce operational costs, improve availability, ease
management, and improve service levels, while allowing businesses to deploy
applications quickly.
Shared processor pools increase throughput by allowing for the automatic non-
disruptive balancing of processing power between partitions assigned to shared pools. It
also provides for the ability to reduce processor-based software licensing costs by
capping the processor core resources used by a group of partitions.
Shared dedicated capacity allows for the “donation” of spare CPU cycles , from
dedicated processor partitions to a shared processor pool. The dedicated partition
maintains absolute priority for dedicated CPU cycles. Enabling this feature can help to
increase system utilization without compromising the computing power for critical
workloads in a dedicated processor.
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Memory Virtualization
PowerVM technology features Active Memory Sharing, a technology that intelligently
and dynamically reallocates memory from one partition to another for increasedutilization, flexibility, and performance. Active Memory Sharing enables the sharing of a
pool of physical memory among logical partitions on a single server. This helps reduce
the need for reserve memory resource capacity in a consolidated environment by
increasing the efficiency of memory utilization, driving down system costs. The memory
is dynamically allocated among the partitions as needed, to optimize the usage of
physical memory in the pool. Along with shared memory, PowerVM technology also
supports dedicated memory allocation, which enables partitions having shared memory
to coexist in the same system as partitions having dedicated memory.
I/O Virtualization
The Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) is an integral part of PowerVM technology. A special-
purpose partition, VIOS eliminates the need for dedicated network adapters, disk
adapters and disk drives, and tape adapters and tape drives in the guest partitions
running as VMs. It can reduce costs by virtualizing I/O resources to those partitions.
VIOS owns the resources that are shared with clients; a physical adapter assigned to the
VIOS partition can be shared by one or more other partitions. With VIOS, guest
partitions can easily be created for test, development, or production purposes. PowerVM
technology also supports dedicated I/O along with VIOS on the same system. Therefore,
a single system can have I/O hosted by VIOS for some partitions and other partitionswith dedicated I/O devices. An organization can thus reserve a dedicated VM of a given
capacity that can be relied upon for high-priority and/or mission-critical workloads,
while assigning other VMs to a general resource pool.
Partition Mobility
Live Partition Mobility facilitates the migration of a running AIX or Linux partition from
one physical server to another without requiring application downtime for planned
system maintenance, migrations, provisioning, and workload management.
Partition Hibernation
IBM POWER7 systems support Partition Hibernation, where a partition can be
suspended and resumed at a later time. In a suspended state, a partition’s resources can
be used by other partitions while the suspended partition’s state is stored in a paging
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space on a persistent storage device. Partition Hibernation can be used for resource
balancing and for planned CEC outages for maintenance or upgrades.
Workload Partitioning
PowerVM technology also supports a software partitioning technology provided by the
AIX operating system, a mode of virtualization capability called Workload Partitions
(WPARs). Introduced with AIX Version 6, WPAR is independent of hardware features.
It enables consolidation of workloads on a single AIX operating system by providing
isolation between workloads running in different WPARs. From an application
perspective, each workload is running in its own operating system environment. A key
feature of WPAR is mobility, a running WPAR can be relocated from one VM to another
on the same operating system platform. This enables applications to be migrated to
another system during planned maintenance operations, to balance workloads, toprovision rapidly to meet growth dynamically, and to improve energy efficiency by
further consolidating on the fly during low load periods.
Systems Management
IBM Systems Director (Express, Standard, and Enterprise Editions) for Power servers
supports the PowerVM environment. It is IBM’s tool for heterogeneous platform
management of Power Systems, IBM System x, IBM System z, and IBM System Storage
systems. IBM Systems Director Editions support advanced management functions such
as system discovery, workload lifecycle management, health monitoring, systemupdates, and topology mappings. It also provides the ability to take action on defined
event thresholds of monitored system components.
IBM Systems Director VMControl transforms Systems Director from managing
virtualization to using virtualization in order to better manage an entire IT
infrastructure. It is offered as a plug-in option included with the Systems Director
Standard and Enterprise Editions. Together, IBM Systems Director and VMControl help
reduce the total cost of ownership in a virtual environment by increasing asset
utilization and reducing the time and effort required to deploy workloads. Using them,
administrators can maintain high levels of availability through proactive monitoringand collaborative troubleshooting, reducing costs further.
VMControl is available in three editions, to suit the varying levels of virtualization
deployment at client sites:
VMControl Express Edition provides basic VM lifecycle management.
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VMControl Standard Edition adds virtual appliance lifecycle management to capture
information from active systems and store it in a repository as reusable system
images (called virtual appliances).
VMControl Enterprise Edition adds system pool lifecycle management. It allows
users to create and manage system pools – or groups of virtual appliances deployed
across multiple physical servers – as easily as managing a single entity. The
advanced virtualization management capabilities of VMControl provide a pathway
for organizations to build sophisticated cloud computing environments.
PowerVM Virtualization Technology Advantages
PowerVM virtualization technology offers a secure virtualization environment built on
the advanced RAS features and excellent performance of the Power Systems platform.PowerVM technology delivers numerous advantages, including:
High resource utilization — PowerVM technology makes the most efficient
utilization of IT investments by virtualizing resources that include processors,
memory, and I/O across multiple virtual machines.
Flexibility — PowerVM technology runs on all Power Systems servers, from blades
to high-end servers. It provides the greatest flexibility by supporting both dedicated
and shared resource models. Unlike VMware vSphere on the x86 platform,
PowerVM virtualization technology allows virtual machines to have all dedicated
resources (CPU, memory and I/O) , or all shared resources (virtual processors,
virtual memory, virtual I/O), or a mix of dedicated and shared resources in the same
LPAR.
Quality of Service — PowerVM technology ensures that workloads achieve high
quality of service even when LPARs share processors from a shared pool.
Scalability — PowerVM technology can reduce server purchases by supporting
partitions as small as 1/10 of a processor. POWER7 processor-based high-end
systems support up to 256 physical processors in a single LPAR and up to 1,000
partitions in a system.
Availability — Live Partition Mobility (LPM) helps eliminate planned downtime by
allowing partitions to be moved to another server while running, freeing hardwarefor upgrades or maintenance without interrupting productive operations. In a
system pool, LPM enables autonomic load balancing across multiple systems.
Resource pools — IBM PowerVM technology has enhanced CPU and memory
affinity to improve performance of resource-intensive workloads, such as database
workloads, across multiple virtual machines sharing resources in a system. IBM
VMControl enhancements make it easier to deploy and manage large numbers of
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these virtual machines in a shared resource pool spanning one or more physical
systems.
Integrated Virtualization
Because of its level of sophistication and maturity, PowerVM technology is commonly
employed with enterprise-class applications and workloads. Power Systems servers
implement virtualization architecture with components embedded in the hardware,
firmware, and operating system software, all while running with significantly less
overhead. The capabilities of this integrated virtualization architecture are significantly
different and, in many areas, more advanced than VMware vSphere and other third-
party software, which must be installed on x86 hardware that leverages hardware-assist
virtualization optimizations.
Power Systems servers and PowerVM virtualization technology capabilities are more
granular and more closely integrated than are those of VMware vSphere or Microsoft
Hyper-V (or equivalent x86-based virtualization tools), or Oracle VM for SPARC. The
Power Systems platform also benefits from numerous industry-leading availability
optimization features. These distinctive capabilities have led to widespread adoption of
Power Systems servers to support the significantly more demanding performance and
uptime requirements of transaction- and database-intensive systems.
Greater Partition Isolation
By enabling “firmware- based” partitions, PowerVM technology provides greater
partition isolation than software-based virtualization technologies. Firmware-based
logical partitions (or virtual machines) reduce the potential for performance bottlenecks
and contribute to higher levels of availability and security than does software-based
virtualization. They also contribute to increased linear scalability.
Partitioning and Workload Management Integration
The importance of workload management cannot be overstated. Partitioning creates the
potential to utilize capacity very efficiently. The extent that this potential is realized in
practice depends on the mechanisms that allocate system resources, monitor, andcontrol workload execution across partitions. If these mechanisms are ineffective, a high
proportion of system capacity may remain idle at any given time.
Close integration of partitioning and workload management capabilities help prevent
surges in workloads running in individual partitions from impacting performance and
availability. POWER7 processor-based systems have a large number of cores per socket,
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abundant memory, and a great deal of I/O bandwidth per core. They also support a high
number of threads per core with simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Different
workloads can benefit from different processor core thread settings; processor-intensive
workloads might benefit from using one thread (SMT1) while workloads that are I/O-intensive can benefit from using several. POWER7 processor-based systems support up
to an SMT4 setting.
Thus, POWER7 processor-based systems consolidate an unprecedented number of
partitions and can handle workload surges more effectively, for demonstrably higher
performance.
Accommodating Greater Consolidation Density
PowerVM technology is optimized to handle business-critical systems and complex
multi-partition production environments. IBM Power Systems and PowerVM
technologies allow a high consolidation ratio and thus greater levels of efficiency in
utilization.
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0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
J
o b s / m i n
5VM 10VM 20VM 40VM
Number of Virtual Machines
TPOX Performance Benchmark
40 VM Scale-out on 8 cores
5 VMs per core
VMware vSphere 4.1 on HP DL580(1vcpu) VMware vSphere 4.1 on HP
PowerVM on Power 750(1vcpu)
PowerVM maximizes workload performance and system resources while running
multiple virtual machines on a core better than does VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1.
IBM Power Systems — with the superior performance of PowerVM virtualization
technology and with features such as reliability, security, high availability, andresiliency — are well positioned for cloud computing and smarter planet solutions today
and in the future.
7/28/2019 IBM PowerVM Virtualization Technology on IBM POWER7 Systems
Edison: IBM – Virtualization Performance White Paper Page 36
The key findings, summarized, are as follows:
In terms of throughput performance, vSphere 5 demonstrated no improvement over
vSphere 4.1 update 1; in fact, it demonstrated slightly lower performance overall.
PowerVM on Power 750 outperforms vSphere 5 on the Intel-based system by up to
131 percent, running the same workloads across virtualized resources.
PowerVM on Power 750 outperforms VMware vSphere 5 by up to 525 percent when
running multiple VMs and workloads, despite the test Intel x86 system (Westmere-
EX) containing a greater number of cores (40 versus 32).
The benchmark results reveal that PowerVM virtualization technology on POWER7
processor-based platforms retains as great a performance advantage over VMware
vSphere 5 on Intel x86 platforms as it does over VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1.Therefore, PowerVM virtualization technology remains the consolidation system of
choice for organizations wishing to realize the full advantages of greater VM density, as
was demonstrated in the earlier edition of the white paper.
The Benchmarks
To obtain the results presented in this addendum, the AIM7 benchmark (described on
Page 7 of this white paper) was employed in two different scenarios. Once again, the
Power Linux version used on PowerVM virtualization technology was SuSE 11 SP1.
SuSE 11 SP1 x86_64 was used as guest OS on VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1.
Scale-Up Benchmark
This scenario tested three platforms: VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 and VMware
vSphere 5, each running on an HP ProLiant DL580 G7 E7-4870 server; and PowerVM
running on an IBM Power 750 system.
AIM7 was scaled in one, two, four, eight, 16, and 32 vCPUs within a single VM. Scaling
was near linear on both the POWER7 processor/PowerVM technology-based systems
and both of the Intel/VMware vSphere platforms.
Running the same workloads across virtualized resources, the POWER7
processor/PowerVM system demonstrated superior performance well over twice the
percentage of either Intel/VMware vSphere 4.1 or Intel/VMware vSphere 5 at one, two,
four, and eight vCPU configurations. At the top end for vSphere 4.1 update 1 (8 vCPUs),
PowerVM technology demonstrated a 103 percent advantage; while at the top end for
As shown in this addendum, IBM PowerVM on POWER 7-based systems demonstrate
the same distinct and considerable advantages over VMware vSphere 5 in workload
throughput performance on x86 Intel-based platforms as over vSphere 4.1 update 1. The
edge that POWER7/PowerVM has over Intel/vSphere remains linearly substantial asVMs and vCPUs are scaled, becoming ever more significant as workloads increase.
A data center scaling up to a cloud-supporting infrastructure or large-scale enterprise
applications would have to purchase, deploy, provision, and maintain a good deal more
hardware and software to achieve the same workload productivity possible with
PowerVM on POWER7. This dilutes the multiple cost advantages delivered via
consolidation, and can increase total cost of ownership in the form of a more complex
infrastructure to manage and more time devoted to systems maintenance.