Advanced POWER Virtualization on IBM System p5 - Previous ...

6.6 Resource management
Owners of IBM System p5 servers using AIX 5L V5.3 with the <strong>Advanced</strong> <strong>POWER</strong>
<strong>Virtualization</strong> feature have the choice of three different workload management
mechanisms:
Shared processor, uncapped partitions
The <strong>POWER</strong> Hypervisor allocates unused processor
cycles to those uncapped partitions that can make use of
them.
Workload Manager (WLM)
Prioritizes applications’ access to system resources:
CPU, memory, and I/O within a partition.
Partition Load Manager (PLM)
Adds and moves CPU and memory resources to and
between partitions using dynamic LPAR operations.
Note: AIX 5L (the scheduler with its process/thread priority mechanism and
the virtual memory manager (VMM)) also manages resources, but this is not
considered in this discussion.
PLM and WLM are only supported on AIX 5L; they are not supported on i5/OS or
on Linux.
This section discusses the relationship between each of these mechanisms and
how they may be used together to optimize resource usage and performance. An
understanding of the PLM, WLM, and shared processor concepts is assumed in
what follows. A comparison of these and other provisioning techniques is given in
Chapter 4, “pSeries provisioning tools overview”, in the Introduction to pSeries
Provisioning, SG24-6389.
Figure 6-32 on page 431 shows the scope of each of the above resource and
workload management mechanisms on IBM System p5 servers.
430 <strong>Advanced</strong> <strong>POWER</strong> <strong>Virtualization</strong> on IBM System p5