[pedz]

I have never understood the global excitement to lpar's. I understand, once you have lpar's, you need VIO. But why manually chop up your resources to begin with?

I can imagine a few special cases where lpars would be nice but they seem to be much more used than I would ever expect. I'd like to understand their attraction to AIX customers.

[prakash]

Hi pedz,
Well as per my understanding you want to know why to choose for "Virtualisation" ?
As per my knowledge and understanding IBM has brought virtualisation concept to help out companies or bussiness to cut their cost in resource.
I mean instead of 5-7 IBM or any other machines with the same or different configuration , will cost them more than having single huge machine ( and then creating those 5-7 virtual machine on that physical macihine).

Bussiness will obviously go for the options where they find cost cutting, and if it is the case with machines or servers running their bussiness then instead of going for 5-6 physical servers , they can go for one single machine. Even if one virtual machine creates problem, it doesn't affect the other machine running. by the use of technologies like clusters, they can manage load balance and low downtime. Since IBM is going to put all these feature in one LPAR machine, so the bussiness willl be attracted towards them.

hope this satisifed your query. if any pls revert..

[pedz]

Well, you dodged my question. Why does the company need 5 to 7 separate machines? Why not just have one giant machine?

[sbzx]

pedz,

A clarification first. Using LPARs is not equal to using VIO. LPARs, even dynamic ones, can go quite well without Virtual IO. You only need VIO if you plan to share SCSI disks and/or ethernet adapters among partitions.

Normally, without VIO that is, the smallest unit of IO devices that can be part of a partition is a PCI slot or an integrated adapter. For instance, if you have two (or any number for that matter) internal SCSI disks on a single backplane attached to an integrated SCSI controller, those two (or more) disks can only be assigned to one LPAR. With VIO, those disks would be assigned to the VIO server and could be shared among a number of partitions, knowing of course that the integrated SCSI adapter and its IO bus will be a bottleneck.

Hope this helps clear the mist.

[astralvoid]

It all boils down to cost and resource utilization. The primary factor of virtualization is cost reduction due to reduction in cost of things such as overall floor space, power needs, air handling, maintenance costs.

In addition, for most applications, a stand-alone machine may have peak moments of activity to push the resource usage towards 100%, but the vast majority of machines idle under 20%. This leave 80% of 'wasted' resource that could be used for other applications.

Overall, cost is the driving factor of virtualization.

[pedz]

So, to keep cost down, don't do the virtualization and don't have separate machines. No one seems to be getting my basic point. These machines have always been multi-threaded, multi-user, multi-tasking, extremely secure, robust machines. There is no need to separate them. They can manage themselves MUCH better and much more dynamically than fixed virtual machines. AIX really is a true operating system. Its not DOS or Windows. So, to repeat my question:

Why have separate machines?

[dthacker]

The top ten reasons LPARS are great tools.

1. It's easy to create development environments. I can create an LPAR, set it on the dev network, and give the devs the root password. It's now their problem.

2. I can test maintenance levels, software upgrades, and scripts in my own admin sandbox against the same hardware that's running on production

3. Micropartioning allows me to allocate only the resources I need, and not affect the performance of the production system.

4. I can reboot my dev LPARS as often as I need to without affecting production

5. I save on rack space, cooling and power.

6. I save on maintenance costs

7. I save on network ports

8. VIO gives me great throughput between LPARS.

9. WLM lets me shift resources between LPARS automagically

10. Did I mention LPARS are really cool?

Dave

[astralvoid]

Originally Posted by pedz

So, to keep cost down, don't do the virtualization and don't have separate machines. No one seems to be getting my basic point. These machines have always been multi-threaded, multi-user, multi-tasking, extremely secure, robust machines. There is no need to separate them. They can manage themselves MUCH better and much more dynamically than fixed virtual machines. AIX really is a true operating system. Its not DOS or Windows. So, to repeat my question:

Why have separate machines?

I cannot understand your point, Pedz. Why do you insist that there is no need to separate them? For example, I have 6 completely different production applications that require their own server resources. Without Virtualization, I would need to setup and manage 6 separate pieces of hardware with a far higher resource cost than the single P-570 that I am using.

Please explain what point you are trying to make because I don't see it.

[pedz]

Originally Posted by astralvoid

I cannot understand your point, Pedz. Why do you insist that there is no need to separate them? For example, I have 6 completely different production applications that require their own server resources. Without Virtualization, I would need to setup and manage 6 separate pieces of hardware with a far higher resource cost than the single P-570 that I am using.

Please explain what point you are trying to make because I don't see it.

You may know things I don't. Why do these applications require separate machines?

[billgncal]

In the new environment that I am working on, a certain production application (which will remain nameless) crashes the server, need to reboot. This server is part of a 4 production lpar environment. The other 3 servers are unaffected by the other lpar crashing, granted it is not all the time.

In another site I worked on, a certain prod application will only run on AIX 5.1 32 bit while I have other applications that easliy run on 5.2 64-bit. They are on seperate lpars.

Easy of use, space(real estate is a prime), easy of mgmt are a few things that come to mind on using lpars.