Advanced Virtualization Capabilities of POWER5 Systems

Overview

IBM POWER5 systems combine enhancements in the IBM PowerPC processor architecture with greatly enhanced firmware to significantly increase the virtualization capabilities of IBM POWER servers. The POWER hypervisor, the basis of the IBM Virtualization Engine technologies on POWER5 systems, delivers leading-edge mainframe virtualization technologies to the UNIX marketplace. The technology behind the virtualization capabilities that are available on the POWER5 servers, enabling customers to better utilize the industry-leading computing capacity of the POWER5 processor, is discussed in this paper.