IBM PowerVM provides a server virtualization environment.
N/A
Oracle Virtualization
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Virtualization is an enterprise-grade server virtualization solution that provides KVM virtualization and management capabilities and built-in disaster recovery features with no license cost.
N/A
Pricing
IBM PowerVM
Oracle Virtualization
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM PowerVM
Oracle Virtualization
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM PowerVM
Oracle Virtualization
Features
IBM PowerVM
Oracle Virtualization
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
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).
Customers considering virtualization software can consider Oracle VM Server as their single-stop solution. The data centre managers should look at this as their first option. And certainly Oracle, with its long legacy in enterprise IT, knows how to build a powerful virtualization platform. Besides its free for Oracle customers makes it pretty unique in its own field.
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...
Remote control via VNC is hard to use with graphic interface and for terminal we have SSH configuration and maintenance is not as straight forward as in VMware, Xen or even Microsoft Hyper-V.
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.
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.
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.
DigitalOcean has no development free tier, so for startups is not as convenient. DigitalOcean DNS system is way easier to use than Oracle's. DigitalOcean firewall is also easier to use and implement. On the other hand, DigitalOcean pricing is more expensive for big VMs (like 64 Gb and 8 CPUs) and above.
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.
