Live Partition Mobility is a chargeable

Live migration Live migration refers to the process of moving a running virtual machine (VM) or application between different physical machines without disconnecting the client or application. Memory, storage, and network connectivity of the virtual machine are ...

feature of IBM

POWER6 The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA v.2.03. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It is claimed to be part of the eCLipz projec ...

POWER7 POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Roche ...

POWER8 POWER8 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA, announced in August 2013 at the Hot Chips conference. The designs are available for licensing under the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is the first time for s ...

and

POWER9 POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in ...

servers, available since 2007, that allows a running

LPAR A logical partition (LPAR) is a subset of a computer's hardware resources, virtualized as a separate computer. In effect, a physical machine can be partitioned into multiple logical partitions, each hosting a separate instance of an operating ...

to be relocated from one system to another. In concept, it is similar to

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

VMotion VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

. Live Partition Mobility, a component of the

PowerVM PowerVM, formerly known as Advanced Power Virtualization (APV), is a chargeable feature of IBM POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8, POWER9 and Power10 servers and is required for support of micro-partitions and other advanced features. Support is pr ...

Enterprise Edition hardware feature, provides the ability to move

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgi ...

, IBM i, and Linux logical partitions from one system to another. The mobility process transfers the system environment that includes the processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users. The source and target systems must have access to the same network and SANs but need not be of the same type, the only requirement is they use POWER6, POWER7, or POWER8 processors. Partitions that are to be relocated must be fully virtualized (i.e. have no dedicated I/O adapters) although it is possible to use multi-pathing software to fail over to virtual adapters for the duration of the move. Any sized partition can be moved; essentially, memory is copied asynchronously from one system to another to create a clone of a running partition, with "dirty" pages being re-copied as necessary. When a threshold is reached (i.e. when a high percentage of the pages have been successfully copied across), the partition is transitioned to the target machine and any remaining pages are copied across synchronously. The agents which carry out the memory copying are nominated Virtual I/O Servers on each machine; a standard Ethernet network is used for data transmission. Live Partition Mobility is used to avoid outages for planned server maintenance, for load balancing across multiple servers and for energy conservation.

References

{{Reflist Power microprocessors Virtualization software

Recommended reading

References