Benefits of partition mobility

Partition mobility provides systems management flexibility and is designed to improve system availability.

For example:

• You can avoid planned outages for hardware or firmware maintenance by moving logical partitions to another server and then performing the maintenance. Partition mobility can help because you can use it to work around scheduled maintenance activities.
• You can avoid downtime for a server upgrade by moving logical partitions to another server and then performing the upgrade. This allows you to continue your work without disruption.
• If a server indicates a potential failure, you can move its logical partitions to another server before the failure occurs. Partition mobility can help avoid unplanned downtime.
• You can consolidate workloads running on several small, under used servers onto a single large server.
• You can move workloads from server to server to optimize resource use and workload performance within your computing environment. With active partition mobility, you can manage workloads with minimal downtime.
• For some systems, you can move applications from one server to an upgraded server by using IBM® PowerVM® Editions Live Partition Mobility or the AIX® Live Application Mobility software, without affecting availability of the applications.

However, while partition mobility provides many benefits, it does not do the following functions:

• Partition mobility does not provide automatic workload balancing.
• Partition mobility does not provide a bridge to new functions. Logical partitions must be restarted and possibly reinstalled to take advantage of new features.