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

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PLM has a relatively high latency (in the order of minutes). This high latency<br />

makes PLM appropriate <strong>on</strong>ly for medium and l<strong>on</strong>g-term changes in resource<br />

usage and ineffective for managing short-lived peaks.<br />

Shared processors<br />

When using shared processor partiti<strong>on</strong>s, the <str<strong>on</strong>g>POWER</str<strong>on</strong>g> Hypervisor manages a<br />

pool of processors shared am<strong>on</strong>g a number of partiti<strong>on</strong>s. Unused processor<br />

cycles can be moved to uncapped virtual processors that require them, giving<br />

them more than they would normally be allowed.<br />

The <str<strong>on</strong>g>POWER</str<strong>on</strong>g> Hypervisor has relatively low latencies. It has a scheduler dispatch<br />

cycle of 10 ms and can make changes to the dispatch in the middle of the cycle.<br />

Dynamic LPAR operati<strong>on</strong>s to increase the entitlement of virtual processors take a<br />

few sec<strong>on</strong>ds.<br />

All virtual processors have to be scheduled <strong>on</strong> physical processors. Having a<br />

very high number of virtual processors (across all partiti<strong>on</strong>s) relative to the<br />

number of physical processors in the shared pool can degrade overall system<br />

performance. AIX 5L Versi<strong>on</strong> 5.3 Maintenance Level 3 significantly reduces the<br />

side effects of large numbers of virtual CPUs (refer to“Virtual processor folding”<br />

<strong>on</strong> page 36.<br />

6.6.2 How load is evaluated<br />

All resource and workload managers rely <strong>on</strong> a measure of resource usage. This<br />

may be an point-in-time measurement or a rolling average over a period of time.<br />

An understanding of how PLM, WLM, and the <str<strong>on</strong>g>POWER</str<strong>on</strong>g> Hypervisor measure<br />

resource usage is necessary to appreciate how they will interact.<br />

Evaluating memory load<br />

Determining precisely how much physical memory is being actively used by all<br />

applicati<strong>on</strong>s in AIX 5L is difficult because AIX 5L’s strategy is to make the best<br />

use of all the resources put at its disposal and it will leave pages in physical<br />

memory even though they are no l<strong>on</strong>ger required.<br />

As an alternative to measuring physical memory usage, as reported by the<br />

vmstat command, it is possible to infer the active memory occupati<strong>on</strong> indirectly<br />

from the paging rates.<br />

WLM uses the standard memory load statistics similar to those provided by the<br />

vmstat command. PLM uses both metrics for evaluating the memory load in a<br />

partiti<strong>on</strong>.<br />

Chapter 6. Partiti<strong>on</strong> Load Manager 433

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