POWER Hypervisor

The POWER Hypervisor™ technology is integrated with all IBM® System i® models, IBM System p® servers, and some IBM BladeCenter® blade servers as part of the system firmware. The hypervisor orchestrates and manages system virtualization, including creating logical partitions and dynamically moving resources across multiple operating environments.

The hypervisor provides the ability to divide physical system resources into isolated logical partitions. Each logical partition operates like an independent system running its own operating environment: AIX®, IBM i, Linux, and the Virtual I/O Server. The hypervisor can assign dedicated processors, I/O, and memory, which you can dynamically reconfigure as needed, to each logical partition. The hypervisor can also assign shared processors to each logical partition using its Micro-Partitioning® feature. Unknown to the logical partitions, the hypervisor creates a shared processor pool from which it allocates virtual processors to the logical partitions as needed. In other words, the hypervisor creates virtual processors so that logical partitions can share the physical processors while running independent operating environments.

The following figure shows a physical system running three logical partitions. Each logical partition is running an operating environment and applications independently of the other logical partitions, while sharing the same physical resources.