IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions vs. IBM PowerVM

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Incentivized

IBM PowerVM only is available on IBM POWER machines. It makes live much easier, compared to bare metal machines (OPAL) or machines with KVM. Personally I would not like to manage systems that don't have IBM PowerVM. The current line-up always includes IBM PowerVM (firmware built-in).

Incentivized

• Ease of use - we don't want to spend extra hours trying to figure out a problem.
• Easy Setup - onboarding was simple and quick.
• Great documentation - Most of the answers to our questions are very easily accessible without additional help.

Incentivized

• IBM PowerVM is reliable and fully redundant with no single points of failure
• Once it is set up, there is not a lot of maintenance that needs to be done on it
• It gives you a lot flexibility by using features like LPM

Incentivized

• Support is horrible and or non-existent
• Documentation is out of date and incorrect for the most part
• IBM employees and salespeople are not aware of features or offerings
• Does not integrate the Zerto, only Veeam and has limited options for data migration

Incentivized

• Each LPAR comes with a profile that sets a minimum, desired and maximum capacity (like for CPU). You can freely change the allocated CPU between the minimum and maximum on-the-fly. If you want to change the resource below the set minimum or above the set maximum, you need to shutdown the partition first and change the profile. It would be nice if there was a way to do that without downtime too.
• (Setting the maximum very high is fine for CPU but not for memory as it allocates a fixed percentage of the maximum (not the current) size for internal housekeeping).
• When you manage your Power system with an HMC, a lot of firmware updates can be done concurrent (on-the-fly), not requiring a power-cycle of the machine. If you use Novalink to manage your systems, this proces becomes broken and you need downtime on your physical system. You can use Live Partition Mobility to move every partition off of this system first, but still...

Incentivized

The product works. It provides the proven environment to support IBM's primary operating systems that run on the IBM Power processing systems. This by extension includes the IBM various storage products that work within that environment. It has proven to be seamless as the environment has grown and as various new products and version updates have been added. As with most IBM products, the support is excellent.

Incentivized

Everything is very clearly laid out. Being familiar with vSphere already, it was a quick transition over to the IBM environment. This allowed us to spend less time on the implementation phase and move quickly to actually utilizing the system on a day to day basis. Also, the performance is very good. No lagginess to the website like our previous on-prem environment.

Incentivized

Since it is built into the firmware (hardware) it requires no separate installation (except for the Virtual I/O servers, if you need those). Both HMC and Novalink (with PowerVC) support IBM PowerVM well and offer a user-friendly interface to setting up LPARs and making changes, most on the fly. Modern systems also give insights into performance, power consumption etc. A lot of separate tools exist to show more details, like LPAR2RRD, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic etc.

Incentivized

Overall, just a great experience here. No one in my opinion gets a perfect 10/10 rating (no one is ever perfect), so 9/10 is probably as good as it gets! From initial planning to post implementation support, the IBM Cloud and professional services has been there for my group as much as we have needed them. Great job!

Incentivized

IBM professional services helped us plan and implement the project with great success. They guided the project from planning, scoping, pre-implementation, testing, roll-out, then production and post-production support. We were very impressed with their knowledge of VMware and really appreciated their desire to make our project a success. I would highly recommend them!

Incentivized

We chose VMware over Azure App Service because of the way that it was at that point natural and still offered similar cloud capacities that Azure would have acquired us. This permitted us to continue to utilize a similar interface and not need to relearn everything beginning to end with another item.

Incentivized

IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features like LPM, shared processor pool...etc, which makes the environment more flexible.

Incentivized

• One of our business objectives was to ensure as close to 100% uptime of our servers and applications. This solution has helped us achieve that goal.
• Another goal was to try and minimize our datacenter footprint. This was achieved by using the product.

Incentivized

• It has provided the performance we need during month end and year end closing cycles.
• It has been very reliable with little to no downtime.
• We have been able to stretch our IT dollars because the refresh rate on IBM Power can run for years. Also, we have been able to add many more VMs to physical machines than other platforms can run.

Incentivized