PowerVP Overview
Power Virtualization Performance (PowerVP™) is a performance monitoring solution that provides detailed and real-time information about virtualized workloads that are running on Power Systems™. PowerVP is a licensed program that is offered as part of PowerVM® Enterprise Edition, but is also available separately for clients without PowerVM Enterprise Edition. You can use PowerVP to understand how virtual workloads use resources, to analyze performance bottlenecks, and to make informed choices about resource allocation and virtualized machine placement.
The PowerVP tool monitors the performance of an entire system (or frame). PowerVP is supported on AIX®, IBM® i, Linux, or Virtual I/O Server operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface that you can use to monitor virtualized workloads. PowerVP includes a system-level monitoring agent that collects data from the PowerVM hypervisor, which provides a complete view of virtualized machines that are running on the server. PowerVP displays the data that is collected at the system level, at the hardware node level, and at the partition level. You can optimize performance by using the PowerVP performance metrics, which provide information about balancing and improving affinity and application efficiency.
PowerVP provides an illustration of the Power Systems hardware topology along with resource usage metrics. The resources utilization is portrayed using different colors to represent utilization thresholds. For example, green color indicates normal, yellow color indicates caution, and red color indicates that some action or resource adjustment should be considered. The colors and thresholds are customizable as the thresholds are installation-dependent. Metrics include nodes, processor modules, cores, Powerbus links, memory controller links, GX I/O bus details, disk drives, and Ethernet links.
The PowerVP tool provides a mapping between real and virtual processor resources. It provides a recording feature for storing performance information with DVR-like functions such as play, fast forward, rewind, jump, pause, or stop. You can find performance bottlenecks by playing back the recorded data at any point in time.
