I worked with AIX on Power5/5+ (mid 2000s) and their hypervisor for LPARs and what they called micro-LPARs at the time was astonishingly good. It provided very nice granularity and control for running multiple LPARs. An LPAR is like a VM, but is closer to bare-metal than what you find in an Intel environment. You had to allocate at least 1/10th of a virtual processor per LPAR. They had something called 'entitled capacity' where you could specify the minimum amount of CPU allocation the LPAR would get even if all LPARs running on the same hardware were running 100% busy at the same time.
It all worked exactly as advertised. I was on a small team that did performance monitoring, optimizations, and capacity planning and we watched the metrics very closely for production workloads (running DB2). It was seriously impressive.
I know the industry is full of technical jargon, but IBM is its own universe that pre-dates all of it.
Are LPARs like virtual machines, or like FreeBSD jails (which are like Docker containers, I think)? I get the impression that LPARs are full virtual machines -- each one could be running a different kernel as well as userland.
100% agree they always have worked in my experience too, still have the pleasure of occasional use of POWER7/8. I always recommended POWER/AIX for reliable compute where budget and s/w compatibility allowed.
I can confirm. I worked at an AIX and Linux shop for about 4 years in the early 2000's. We had a couple of "enterprise" customers who didn't yet trust Linux for their critical applications. It was IBM all the way.
Note, that for that era, AIX was a very solid choice. Only other real option was Sun/Solaris, which was dying after the dot-com implosion.
neverartful|4 years ago
It all worked exactly as advertised. I was on a small team that did performance monitoring, optimizations, and capacity planning and we watched the metrics very closely for production workloads (running DB2). It was seriously impressive.
watersb|4 years ago
I know the industry is full of technical jargon, but IBM is its own universe that pre-dates all of it.
Are LPARs like virtual machines, or like FreeBSD jails (which are like Docker containers, I think)? I get the impression that LPARs are full virtual machines -- each one could be running a different kernel as well as userland.
656565656565|4 years ago
icedchai|4 years ago
Note, that for that era, AIX was a very solid choice. Only other real option was Sun/Solaris, which was dying after the dot-com implosion.
cyberge99|4 years ago
I enjoy posts like this because they’re true to a “hacker” mindset: Implementing an unconventional approach - either for use or novelty.
Thinking outside of the box, while a cliche these days was clearly done here. Who else wakes up and thinks, “I wonder if I could run Aix on an M1?” :)
allenrb|4 years ago
selfhoster11|4 years ago