Dynamic Logical Partitioning for Linux on POWER 111
An anonymous reader writes "Logical partitioning provides POWER processor-based servers with the capability to do server consolidation and optimize system resources. Dynamic logical partitioning enhances this capability by providing control of the allocation of the resources without impacting the logical partitions availability. Linux on POWER supports dynamic LPAR for changes to physical I/O, virtual I/O, and processor resources."
droool... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:droool... (Score:5, Informative)
What it does is allow reconfiguration of system resources, such as IO cards, memory or cpu's (or on Power 5 with AIX 5.3, portions of a cpu), etc. on the fly without having to reboot your server to acknowledge them. AIX has had this capability since 5.2.
It's great for being able to juggle your resources on the fly, but it really comes in handy for moving your DVD drive between partitions on a frame without having to reboot. Having to reboot 2 servers just for that is a royal PITA.
Re:droool... (Score:2)
has it got to do something with the CPU ? what about memory and I/O cards ?
Re:droool... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:droool... (Score:1)
Re:droool... (Score:2)
wait till you figure out SMT! (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a pdf [ibm.com].
Re:wait till you figure out SMT! (Score:2)
Not quite the same. While Intel hyperthreading is in broad terms a similar idea the implementation is different.
As I understand it SMT duplicates all of the stuff before the guts of the processor so there are two complete pipelines etc. whereas Intel has a single pipeline so when the processor switches from one thread to another there is overhead involved in refilling the pipeline from the second thread that does not exist in the POWER implementation.
Cool, but still buggy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and an after-thought:
Redundancy is achieved with multiple independent subsystems
Well, in the case of LPAR, when your host OS decides to pull a quickie on you, you find yourself on a standstil with an entire company of 100+ users without their apps running. I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of the iSeries admin in that case.
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
It depends.. (do note: I'm not the expert, I just was forced to play(hack) with it when things didn't work)
The OS/400-centric implementation would have a tendancy of managing the partitions from the OS400 operating system, feeding-off virtual scsi devices to the neighbour partitions, which is logical in a way, since you confine all your backups to one operating system.
The LPAR will pool your cpu and memory ressources, but you still have to feed it an I/O subsystem for Disks, Ethernet, etc.. I aven't se
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2)
Which is why a lot of people create two VIO servers, to provide redundancy across two seperate LPARS. Tha
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
Ther are two ways you can do LPARs. If you have enough available, Physical IO resources for each LPAR, then you can assign each LPAR it's own NIC, Hard Disc controller, SCSI controller for Tape, etc.
If you don't have enough Physical IO, then you can have an instance of your favorite os (Linux, AIX or os/400) "own" all of the physical IO and serve out it's resources to the other LPARS.
_or_ you can have a mix of the two. For example, you could have one LPAR running Linux f
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:2)
The current 2 Way (HS20) Xeon DP EM64T based blades use SCSI drives (not hot swapable). So you can put 14 2 way servers in a 7U chassis. In addition to just density this also helps on saving other infrastructure for network cabling, KVM and power.
The 4 way blades (HS40) are still junk, old IA-32 only Xeon MP chips, IDE drives etc. If you have an application that must scale above 2 Way then don't use a blade for that application.
Re:Cool, but still buggy (Score:1)
Jho
Power Rocks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
If you are looking for a $999 server I think you might be looking in the wrong place. If you are going to haul freight you don't go get a Toyota Pickup with a 4 banger. You go get a Big Rig and get hauling. If you have an application that is a heavy load you go get a Power/5 and you might pay more but you know it is going to hold up under the strain of the load. You can get a small Power5 System from IBM for around $9000 and the same HP or DELL would not cost much less
Re:Power Rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Target market for Power(5): Servers. No mainframes (as those are a different area), no HPC (horrible FPU/$ performance compared to main competitors), no small servers (PPC970 is more or less dead in the water, and power5 with its horribly expensive MCMs isnt cost effective in the more "normal" enviroment.
SO i _seriously_ doubt "the entire world" will be using power in 10 years. They can be happy if the keep their market share.
Re:Power Rocks (Score:2, Interesting)
With PS3, Xbox 360 and Revolution containing some flavor of POWER5 (Cell certainly has inherited POWER5 technologies), I'm pretty sure "the entire world" would have these powerful capabilities. Unlike workstations and PCs, these game machines won't be so hacker friendly but then I doubt if most people of "the entire world" would care less....
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
"10 guys near my desk" is not an accepted marketing survey technique and the results should not be used to estimate global demand. Other demographic groups, particularly females, may show significantly different preferences. Sony and IBM are registered trademarks. So are Dell, HP, Gateway, Intel and AMD but since they are not using POWER this statement is not needed.
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Also, no small servers? I don't know who you've been buying from, but tear up your contract with them right now. IBM offers really low end SMB servers (ie. the i5 520 Express Edition) that use POWER5 chips and have the same pricepoint as their Intel-based xSeries brothers.
I wouldn
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:5, Funny)
I respectfully and completely disagree. The world enjoys using a 64-bit extension to the 4004 architecture. We like using a single-accumulator processor with 3 "general purpose" registers. We adore the massively irregular instruction set, we like saying "push bp/mov bp,sp" every four instructions. We like the whole notion of putting values in certain (and only those) registers, so we can say "repne scasb", or "mul" or "div". The segmented memory architecture and the segment registers, are, in a word, brilliant. The notion of "near" and "far" calls and jumps, and the fact that the segment and offset are pushed in the wrong order is an endless source of delight for us. The floating point unit, and its instruction set, are nothing short of poetry in silicon. The pipelining and branch prediction are the the epitome of efficiency.
In other words, you are just another sadly mistaken fanboy of an inferior processor architecture.
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:2)
No, just scarred. I love the Power architecture, and I'm making fun of the x86. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, and I could have gone on. I do hope your prediction turns out to be true.
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:2)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Power Rocks (Score:1)
zSeries? (Score:2)
Re:zSeries? (Score:2)
But, yeah. ITs all from the mainframe world.
I mean, without this you can still run Linux on an LPAR, and you can still give that LPAR fractional CPU allotment (capped or non capped) and frational IO (ethernet, harddisk). Now you can just do it on the fly.
Done for years (Score:3, Informative)
They also support Redhat and SuSE. Good stuff!
Re:Done for years (Score:1)
Re:Done for years (Score:1)
The pSeries and zSeries guys have had an HMC (HSC, actually) for years. Now that IBM is trying to make it more friendly for the iSeries folks, it actually has a gui. Iv'e talked to quite a few AIX guys that really like the interface, and just as many that want their command line back.
Of course those guys are very happy to learn that a quick click on the HMC desktop, and you have a shell.
Anyways... on iSeries power5, you have n
Re:HOWTO: Slashdot Advertising For FREE (Score:1, Informative)
But, this seems a lot more like an advertisement for IBM than 'news'.
Re:HOWTO: Slashdot Advertising For FREE (Score:2)
Re:HOWTO: Slashdot Advertising For FREE (Score:1)
LPAR on POWER - The Packet Sniffers episode 5 (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.packetsniffers.org/ [packetsniffers.org]
Tip of the iceberg... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a good technology, and if there are people wanting to get LPAR capabilities without having to purchase all that extra IBM OS's (AIX, i5/OS), you might look into the OpenPower line. 2 way or 4 way POWER 5 systems that run only linux and can create upto 40 LPAR's on one system. That's bascially like having 40 different Linux servers all running at the same time on 4 total processors.
I agree this technology has some limitations as of right now, but it may not be a bad idea to look at it. And remember, this is PPC Linux, not your standard Intel Linux. While your boss won't know the difference, you should.
Re:Tip of the iceberg... (Score:3, Informative)
The only problem I have with pSeries linux is that it somewhat negates the cost advantage of Linux on Intel. Well, make that obliterates the cost advantage. IBMs AIX is free with the hardware. Linux is licensed per instance. So it's cheaper to ru
Re:Tip of the iceberg... (Score:1)
Re:Tip of the iceberg... (Score:1)
Article vs. Advertisement (Score:1)
Xen (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like IBM has placed into hardware what systems like Xen currently does in software, allocating virtual space for different operating systems to share resources and execute simultaneously.
Re:Xen (Score:2)
Re:Xen (Score:2)
Not without CPU level hardware support. I don't know if this [theregister.co.uk] tiny mention of support means they will have the features required for that level of control, but it's something that piqued my interest.
Re:Xen (Score:2)
LPAR on AIX and Linux is real virtualization. Similar to Solaris 10's container or the old Sunfire hardware Dynamic Domain Reconfiguration. Split at the hardware level.
Re:Xen (Score:2)
You're wrong :P
The reason you're wrong is that the LPAR concept has been in big iron for quite a few years, long pre-dating Xen and even pre-dating VMWare. Saying that IBM have put the Xen concept into hardware makes it sound like IBM are the ones who copied an idea. Xen is a
Still no support for Dynamic Memory (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still no support for Dynamic Memory (Score:2)
Re:Still no support for Dynamic Memory (Score:2)
Linux would be fine, but there's no price advantage, and aix is more mature. But dynamic memory isn't the real issue there - most of the memory will be consumed by the database - so it's db2's ability to dynamically change memory footprint that is the more critical.
nanokernel (Score:2)
Re:nanokernel (Score:1)
The VIOS acts as a broker of disk and communication resources. You can have one ethernet adapter assigned to a VIOS and create upto 20 virtual LAN's and basically an unlimited number of SEA's (Shared Ethernet Adapters) for client partitions.
As for disk, you can have one SCSI controller and create vSCSI adapters
How long before.. (Score:1)
Linux Needs This (Score:1)
Re:Solaris Zones. (Score:1)
Re:Solaris Zones. (Score:1)
good job sun.
LIcensing? (Score:3, Interesting)
for i in *.rpm; do rpm -qilp $i |grep -i license; done
Size: 2547252 License: IBM Corp.
(lots of output deleted)
11 "IBM Corp." licenses.
1 IBM Common Public License (CPL)
1 GPL
Open Source it ain't. I'd rather use Xen.
- Necron69
Good stuff... (Score:2)
Does this work with PowerLinux? (Score:2)
Re:Does this work with PowerLinux? (Score:1)
partitioning vs cheap hardware (Score:1)
Re:partitioning vs cheap hardware (Score:1)
Re:partitioning vs cheap hardware (Score:2)
In a lpar situation you can still easily provide the extra resources - with a more traditional server configuration you'll have to rehost. Which will completely waste the cost of your prior server, plus you've got to pay for a larger one as well - which may only be maxed out once a month. Then there's the labor, outage, and risk involved in the migration - whi
LPARS (Score:1)
Re:LPARS (Score:1)
But the HMC does provide a very good way of supporting multiple systems from one console. I'm not sure if you're working with p4 or p5 architecture, but on the p5 they've moved it from a serial network to an IP network for managing the servers. Much better to have one CAT 5 cable out of that HMC than to have a few RAN's hanging off th
Re:LPARS (Score:1)
Re:LPARS (Score:2)
I'm trying to find the powerpoint of from the speaker in question (Scott Cour
Re:LPARS (Score:1)
Re:LPARS (Score:1)
I thought you would be very interested in this. IBM just announced the IVM. It allows you to partition a single server without the need of an HMC. That functionallity has been moved internal to the system. Check out the latest announcement [ibm.com].
Old NEWS! (Score:1)
In fact, I'm running Linux & AIX on the same cluster, separate LPARs. All over the place. Hrmph. Jho
One other intresting note.... (Score:2)
You forgot the $4k HMC that you need, (Score:2)
It's all about management (Score:1, Interesting)
What about the concurrent firmware upgrade feature that has just been rolled out as promised in the latest power5/HMC code
- anyone else ever tried firmware updating 7 boxes some running multiple partitions at once WITHOUT disruption to the patitions in question?
I just have - nice little feature!
Re:hey guys... (Score:1)