IBM PowerVM Room for Improvement

Atif Najam - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Information Officer and Program Lead at Gatron Industries Ltd

The only problem with the IBM system is improving its hardware licensing model. For example, when you procure a server with 40 physical codes, you must also procure licenses to activate the codes. In Dell or any system, you procure the hardware and have the full right to use the hardware. For IBM, it's different because when you procure a 40-code processor and have 40 physical codes, you only have a license to use 20. As a result, the 20 alert codes will always be in activated mode. Hence, the hardware licensing model could be improved because the licensing model is a bit different from the standard hardware procured.

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Sujeet-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager Cloud Infrastructure at Path Infotech ltd

As I understand it, IBM sells all its hardware to Lenovo, and only PCs servers are managed by IBM. It's uncertain how much longer IBM will continue in this way, especially with the current trend of transitioning from on-premises to cloud and hybrid models. The market is evolving.

Given this market shift, it's essential to identify areas for improvement. IBM has introduced the PowerVM Series, including Linux, which is a positive step. However, customers are already moving towards x86 servers due to cost considerations. The cost of PowerVM compared to x86 servers appears to be a significant factor.

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Atif Najam - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Information Officer and Program Lead at Gatron Industries Ltd

A GUI version of VIOS would be a great plus for people moving from Intel-based hypervisors.

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Naunton Cheesman - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Cloudstratex

SRM for site recovery is a feature that should be included. The only missing element is the disaster recovery tooling.

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MohamedAmr - PeerSpot reviewer
Infra Business Development Manager at GBM

IBM PowerVM does not support Microsoft. This is the only constraint. The IBM PowerVM supports the AIX system, which is a Unix system for IBM Unix, but it does not support Microsoft Windows.

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SamuelOguta - PeerSpot reviewer
Head IT Infrastructure & Operations at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is quite pricey. 

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MK
Chief Information Officer at a paper AND forest products with 1,001-5,000 employees

The automatic failover feature of IBM PowerHA ensures smooth high availability cluster. However, if the no. of days the failover happened in a year is within 10, then there is no need to buy Oracle licenses for the secondary server. If such failovers exceed 10 in a year, then Oracle license need to be purchased for the secondary server as well. This will potentially lead to huge financial impact. 

IBM may provide an option to switch from "automatic failover" to "manual failover" option if the no. of failovers in a year reached 6 or 7. This will avoid the risk of the automatic failover exceeding 10 in a year if the system administrator fails to make note of the no. of failovers in a year and maintain it within 10.

Read https://www.oracle.com/assets/data-recovery-licensing-070587.pdf to know more about the Oracle's 10-day failover licensing rule.

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MN
IT Manager at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Whenever you go to the virtualization, you may experience performance issues. They need to better cater to virtualization with respect to performance. I'm not saying I'm facing any performance issue, however. It's more of a theoretical concern, as people say you have to compromise with respect to the performance whenever you move to virtualization.

The licensing could be better. The pricing and the licensing fees are very high with respect to the number of core licenses. So price factor on the Intel-based architecture is much less compared to IBM, for example. 

We have not confirmed their roadmap with respect to the cloud. Since IBM has acquired Red Hat, they may promote Red Hat for the cloud version. We don't know whether they are introducing AIX for their cloud platform as well or not. That we would love. Otherwise, we need to move to the Linux environment. In any case, they need to be more transparent with their plans for the cloud.

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JL
Owner at Inventrics technologies

The product's pricing could be less expensive compared to other competitors.

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Mohamed Ibrahim Gaber - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at Arab African International Bank

The solution should be advanced to fit with the container constantly.

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Kevin Honde - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Solution Architect at Econet Wireless Zimbabwe

Currently, it's working fine. It's not really lacking too much in the way of features.

If it could actually virtualize the entire platform it might be better. If you're having more than one virtualization technology, maybe there's a way to actually have less - one technology to run the data center and maybe one special virtualization for power. If it integrated with other platforms more effectively it might be better.

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MG
Unix Team Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

IBM now makes provides us with quality GUI tools to make the experience easier and successful.

I don't have an issue with the current configuration or with the GUI. I worked on both with the team. 

I would like for IBM to be more focused on the cloud. 

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AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM

This solution is lacking the ability to have servers act as a cluster, such as in VMware. IBM has come out with a feature similar to VMware's vCenter but it is not as mature. They need to add LPM shared-nothing feature, such as in vMotion.

IBM is a hardware company. They have always had the view of, why implement something in software that I can implement in hardware. The virtualized hardware can do many things whereas these other vendors are software vendors that can only work on hardware. However, this sometimes makes IBM less advanced in terms of software because they rely more on the hardware. That is why they need to look at VMware as a model for advancing their PowerVC offering to match VMware's vCenter. Similar to what Red Hat did. Red Hat Manager is very close to vCenter, they are trying to mimic the options.

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AX
System Administrator at Banco Nacional de Angola

IBM PowerVM could improve the price because it is expensive.

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it_user1195593 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Any improvements that can be made in the interface will go a long way to helping us work better.

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AY
Senior Database Administrator at a government with 11-50 employees

PowerVM's platform build and performance could be improved.

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Amro Saleh - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Arab Bank

The price is high. 

I would like for them to add more automation features. 

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IS
Systems PreSales Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

IBM should review the price of this solution in my opinion; it is too high. Other than that, I can't think of any other ways to improve PowerVM as our customers are very satisfied with it, particularly with its stability and scalability.

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PB
System Engineer at Unistar

The interface is not user-friendly in places, so it could use some improvement.

If PowerVM were cheaper then it would better compete with VMware vCenter.

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RE
Database Administrator at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Compared to VMWare, the price could be lower.

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AA
ICT Business Solution Architect at Cloud Technology

I would like to see an improvement in the management of the program.

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EL
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The performance should be improved. 

They should reduce the cost to purchase the hardware of the physical server.

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Buyer's Guide
Server Virtualization Software
April 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, VMware, KVM and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: April 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.