Introduction to PowerVC

With PowerVC you can register physical hosts, storage providers, and network resources and use them to create a virtual environment. After the resources are registered, you can do the following tasks and more.

• Create virtual machines by deploying images and then resize and attach volumes to them.
• Import existing virtual machines and volumes so they can be managed by PowerVC.
• Create a project, add resources to the project, and assign users unique roles within each project.
• Monitor the utilization of the resources that are in your environment.
• Enable the IBM® PowerVC Dynamic Resource Optimizer (DRO) to automatically rebalance host group resources when they are being overused.
• Migrate virtual machines while they are running (Live Partition Mobility).
• Capture a running virtual machine that is configured just the way you want it to be. Then, deploy that image elsewhere in your environment.
• Deploy images quickly to create new virtual machines that meet the demands of your ever-changing business needs.
• Enable PowerVC to automatically place virtual machines when you deploy or migrate them based on the criteria that you specify.

IBM Power® Virtualization Center provides support for larger enterprises with more complex system configurations. It enables you to maximize the virtualization capabilities of your Power Systems hardware with a powerful yet easy-to-use interface. Its key features include the following:

• Supports IBM Power Systems hosts that are managed by a Hardware Management Console.
• Supports storage area networks.
• Supports multiple Virtual I/O Server virtual machines on each host.
• Supports shared storage pools
• Supports host and storage templates to help you consistently and reliably deploy virtual machines across your environment.
• Supports storage connectivity groups, which enable you to deploy images so they have access to storage that is dedicated to a particular purpose. They also help to ensure that virtual machines have access to the same storage before and after they are migrated.