A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX,

Solaris and AIX

IBM's POWER7 Systems alter the 2010 landscape

Skill Level: Intermediate

Ken Milberg (kmilberg@gmail.com)

Writer/site expert
Future Tech

14 Oct 2008

Updated 23 Mar 2010

Most AIX® administrators understand the virtualization features available to them on

their System p® platform through PowerVM™, which is also available on the System
p for Linux®. What about the other UNIX® hardware platforms? What do they have
to offer and how do some of their features compare to PowerVM. This article
explores innovations for 2009 and 2010, including coverage of IBM's newly released
POWER7 systems.

Introduction
Why is virtualization so important? The short answer is that virtualization enables
businesses to lower their technology Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while
increasing their Return on Investment (ROI). This is done primarily through the
multitude of server consolidation projects proliferating every organization's
infrastructure in some fashion today. What do the top UNIX vendors have to offer
with respect to virtualization? IBM offers PowerVM, formerly referred to as Advanced
Power Virtualization, and has just released their POWER7 Systems, which alter the
virtualization space (see What's on the horizon in 2010?). HP offers their Virtual
Server Environment, which supports both their Integrity and HP9000 server base.
Sun offers a new name, the xVM server, along with their mature container-based

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technology. This article, updated to include all of the 2009 and 2010 innovations
from each vendor, looks at the features of each of these technologies, and contrast
and compares them with what you are most familiar with, PowerVM.

HP virtualization
This section discusses HP's Virtual Server Environment (VSE) as well as vPars,
nPartitions, and IVMs.

HP's VSE is the front-end for HP's overall virtualization strategies. VSE itself
contains several elements, including a workload management tool and advanced
manageability software. The workload management feature lets you draw from
spare capacity, which is available on a pay-per-use basis. This is similar in many
respects to IBM's Capacity on Demand. Further, HP Global Workload Manager
(gWLM) provides intelligent policy engines that allow for automatically adjusting the
workloads to increase server utilization. It also comes with a product called HP
Capacity Advisor, which helps you simulate various workload scenarios and is
similar in many ways to IBM's System workload Estimator (WLE), which ships with
their System Planning Tool. The VSE also lets you partition in several ways, with
hard and soft partitions, as well as HP Virtual machines, partitions, and secure
resource partitions. HP describes their virtualization/partitioning solutions as their
partitioning continuum. Available partitioning includes:

• nPartitions offers true electrical isolation as well as cell granularity.

nPartitions are based on hard partitions, which were first introduced by
HP in 2000 and offer greater fault isolation than soft partitions. nPartitions
let you service one partition while others are online, which is similar to
IBM's logical partitioning, though systems require a reboot when moving
cells from one partition to another. It's important to note that while
nPartitions support HP-UX, Windows®, VMS, and Linux, they only do so
on their Itanium processor, not on their HP9000 PA Risc architecture.
Partition scalability also depends on the operating system running in the
nPartition. Another downside is that entry-level servers do not support this
technology — only HP9000 and Integrity High End and Midrange servers.
They also do not support moving resources to and from other partitions
without a reboot.
• vPars are separate operating system instances on the same nPartition or
server. This offering lets you dynamically move either CPU or memory
resources between partitions as the workload requirements change. They
also give you the ability to run multiple copies of HP-UX on the same
hardware. Using vPars, you can move CPUs to other running partitions,
similar to PowerVM and the System p. What you can't do with vPars is
share resources, because there is no virtualized layer in which to manage
the interface between the hardware and the operating systems. This is

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one reason why performance overhead is limited, a feature that HP will

market without discussing its clear limitations. The scalability is also
restricted as to the nPartition that the vPar is created on, the max being
an 8 cell limitation. There is also limited workload support; resources
cannot be added or removed. Finally, vPars also don't let you share
resources between partitions, nor can you dynamically allocate
processing resources between partitions.
• Integrity Virtual Machines (IVMs) are separate guest instances on the
same nPartition with different operating system versions and users in a
fully isolated environment. First introduced in 2005, they allow for a
partition to have its own full copy of the operating system. Within this
copy, the virtual machines share the resources. This is similar in many
ways to IBM's PowerVM, as there is granularity for CPUs and I/O device
sharing. The granularity actually beats PowerVM because you can have
up to 1/20 of a micropartition; the System p allows for only 1/10 of a CPU.
The downside here is scalability. With HP's virtual machines there is a 4
CPU limitation and RAM limitation of 64 GB. Reboots are also required to
add processors or memory. There is no support for features such as
uncapped partitions or shared processor pools. Finally, it's important to
note that HP PA RISC servers are not supported; only Integrity servers
are supported. Virtual storage adapters also cannot be moved, unless the
virtual machines are shut down. You also cannot dedicate processing
resources to a single partition.
• Resource Partitions are created from the HP Process resource manager
and allow resources for specific applications within a single operating
system. This is also a resource management tool, which lets you manage
CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth. It allows minimum allocations of
CPUs, and even lets you cap a CPU by group. In many ways, this is
similar to a Solaris container or AIX WPAR in that it lets you have several
applications residing in one copy of HP-UX. This feature has been
available since HP-UX 9.0.

New features for HP-UX in 2009

With release 4.1, HP-UX now lets you have online workload migration, available on
Integrity Virtual machines only. This is similar to AIX's Live Application mobility. The
March 2009 release, Version HP-UX 11iv3, also provides several enhancements,
including the new parconfig command, which provides help for the recommended
configuration of nPartitions. It also provides support for accelerated virtual I/O
(AVIO) for networking on Windows and Linux guests, which gives clients up to a
two-fold improvement in throughput over older virtualized storage3 and integrity
solutions, as well as a 60% reduction in service demand. It consists of two
components: an Integrity VM host and a VM Guest component.

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For details on 2010 announcements, see What's on the horizon in 2010?.

Sun virtualization
Now that you've seen HP virtualization, take a closer look at Sun's xVM, along with
containers, hardware partitioning, and logical domains.

Sun made some bold changes in 2008, the most important being the release of
xVM. Sun's xVM is actually a mix of four separate technologies, the first of which
was introduced in February of 2008: xVM Ops Center. xVM Ops Center's most
important function is that it provides a single console for the management of all
devices in a virtualized environment. It further allows for the discovery and
management of all physical and virtual assets. The other three technologies include
the xVM server, VirtualBox, and VDI software. The xVM server is a hypervisor-based
solution, which is based on Xen, running under Solaris on x86 computers. On
SPARC it is still based on logical domains. Containers and LDOMs now are part of
the umbrella named xVM.

New to Solaris in 2009

One new feature, introduced in the October 2008 update of Solaris, allows users to
migrate workloads among Solaris systems and reduce the administrative overhead
required to move containers between unlike configurations. This lets Solaris 8 and 9
containers run multiple Solaris 8 or 9 environments on one SPARC system. In an
October 2009 release, their latest update, a new feature allows for parallel patch
installation of virtual Solaris containers.

Sun is also claiming features such as predictive self-healing, which has long been
available on the System p. VirtualBox is desktop virtualization software geared
toward developers, allowing for many different types of operating systems to run on
top of an existing desktop operating system. It supports Windows, Linux, Mac, and
Solaris hosts. Sun did not develop this product, but acquired open source desktop
virtualization vendor Innotel, which develops the product.

Sun also offers hardware partitioning, which allows their high-end servers to be
divided into four-process partitions. These are referred to as Sun DSD's. In many
ways, this technology is similar to IBM's logical partitioning, which was introduced in
2001, with no real virtualization capabilities. It is also similar to HP's hardware
partitioning in that only high-end and mid-range servers support this technology. You
cannot share resources between partitions nor can you dynamically allocate
processing resources between partitions. You also cannot share any I/O. It's the
LDOMs that actually allow virtualization. Introduced in 2007 on their SunFire line of
servers, LDOMs enable customers to run multiple operating systems
simultaneously. While LDOMs solved a huge deficiency in Sun's virtualization

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strategy, it has many inherent flaws:

• Scalability — Only eight CPUs and 64 GB RAM on one machine

• Server-line — Only low-end Sparc servers are supported
• Limited micro-partitioning — Four partitions on T1, 8 on T2
• No dynamic allocation between partitions
For years, Sun's answer to everything was containers or zones. Containers and
zones give you the ability to run multiple virtual operating system instances inside
only one kernel. They are used to provide an isolated and secure environment for
running applications, which are created from a single instance of Solaris.

Simply put, they had it and IBM did not. Sun can no longer make this claim. IBM now
offers AIX workload partitions (WPARs), which is their answer to containers. IBM
WPARs have all the features of containers plus additional innovations:

• Application WPARS — A workload partition that allows a single process

or application to run inside of it, like a wrapper. Unlike a standard WPAR,
it is temporary and stops when the application ends.
• Live Application Mobility — This feature lets you move running WPARs
to other partitions without any user disruption. With Solaris, you need to
shut off the zone first. The feature also lets you perform multi-system
workload balancing, which can be used to conserve data center costs.
While Sun appears to be moving in the right direction with xVM, it still needs to
standardize its offerings more. There is still too much confusion around their
offerings and virtualization roadmap. Nothing new has been announced in 2010 in
the Sun world, unless you want to discuss Sun ending development of its 16-core
UltraSPARC-RK processor.

IBM virtualization
IBM has a 40-plus year history of virtualization. No other vendor can come close to
making this claim. The fact is that virtually (pardon the pun) everything they have
implemented on the mid-range, has already been done on the mainframe. They offer
one virtualization strategy, PowerVM, unlike the myriad of solutions available from
Sun or HP. The technology itself uses a hypervisor-based solution (which IBM has
finally implemented though Xen, but only on their x86 platform), which sits between
the operating system and the hardware. PowerVM is a combination of hardware and
software, which accounts for the IBM Systems p virtualization strategy.

The technology that makes up PowerVM includes:

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• Micropartition and Shared processor pools — Micropartioning lets you

slice up pieces of your CPUs into virtual partitions. At the same time, it
allows for the sharing of CPU, RAM, and I/O. You can carve your partition
with up to 1/10 of a CPU. Using a feature called uncapped partitions, you
can even exceed the amount of hardware that you configure on your
partition, your entitled capacity (EC), which is an important feature in
environments where activity fluctuates. This workload management is all
done automatically, without requiring the usage of speciality workload
management tools. IBM has since retired their workload management
tool, Partition Load Manager (PLM), recognizing that it was the
automation inherent in its shared processor pool strategy that really
captivated the audience.
• VIO Servers — These are special partitions that let you to service
resources to VIO clients. The servers own the actual resources, which are
network adapters or disk I/O. These partitions save money and provide
flexibility by allowing partitions to shared I/O resources. Shared Ethernet
and virtual SCSI are the solutions that allow for sharing network and disk
I/O.
During the past year, IBM has changed their virtualization nomenclature from
Advanced Power Virtualization to PowerVM. In the process, IBM added several
significant features to their virtualization product line:

• Live Partition Mobility — This feature, introduced with the Power6

architecture, lets you move running AIX or Linux partitions from one
physical server to another.
• Lx86. This recent innovation lets you run x86 Linux applications that were
not specifically ported to the Power Architecture directly on a Linux
partition without a recompile.
• Shared Dedicated Capacity — This feature lets you spare CPU cycles
from dedicated processor partitions toward the shared processor pool.
• Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) — This is a browser-based tool
that provides the option of not having to have a dedicated hardware
management console (HMC) from which to manage virtualization
resources.

Active Memory Sharing

Active Memory Sharing (AMS) is a new feature introduced in 2009. This feature,
available on Power6, is the final piece of the puzzle for PowerVM on Power6. It
allows for the sharing of RAM, similar to how users have been able to share and
micropartition CPUs, which, in turn, allows for the increased use of memory through

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the Power hypervisor without having to do a DLPAR operation. AMS makes it

possible to use spare idle memory not being used by other LPARs toward the
distribution of LPARs. This empowers customers to optimize their RAM configuration
and ensures that resources do not sit idly by while their brethren LPARs may be in
dire need of assistance. The next section introduces the new POWER7 system.

How does AMS accomplish this? It does so by allowing for a shared memory pool,
which is virtualized through the Power hypervisor. There is no binding of physical
memory to a partition's logical memory in this environment. In fact, the total logical
memory of all shared memory partitions are allowed to exceed the real physical
memory allocated to the pool. This results in logical memory being oversubscribed,
which is okay because the hypervisor takes care of all the logistics. Essentially, the
hypervisor backs excess logical memory using paging devices. It does this through a
special paging VIOs partition. AIX still manages its own paging device, which helps
the hypervisor manage the oversubscription. The hypervisor actually asks the
operating system for help, and the OS steals aged pages, saves the contents to
paging devices, and loans them out. This feature is enabled through a framework
called collaborative memory management, which is a new feature of the OS that lets
the OS page out contents and loan pages to the hypervisor. AMS also provides a
great deal of flexibility because it can be disabled, making the hypervisor paging
device the only device that needs to be optimized. This is only available through AIX
and System i, not Linux. It should also be said that neither HP nor Sun offers
anything remotely close to AMS.

What's on the horizon for 2010?

On the same day in February when IBM chose to announce their new POWER7
product line, HP also announced new Integrity servers, which will use Intel's Itanium
9300 processor—codenamed Tukwila. While there are currently no available HP
products powered by the new Tukwila chips, they are rumored to be arriving in May.
Interestingly, the Tukwila Itanium's sub-2GHz speed is manufactured using a 65 nm
process, while IBM's new POWER7 was manufactured using a 45 nm processor,
which means that the new IBM chip should run faster, with lower power, than HP's
new chip. While Tukwila is certainly an important innovation, at the time of this
writing, no roadmap for HP products containing these chips had been published.
IBM on the other hand, has the roadmap, servers, and virtualization enhancements.
They are all real and not just vaporware.

In addition to the obvious chip advantages just mentioned, the POWER7

architecture also introduces:

• Modular systems with linear scalability

• Physical and virtual management

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• Binary capability
• Energy Thermal Management
• PowerVM feature improvements
This article focuses on the PowerVM virtualization enhancements around the
POWER7. What is most impressive is that benchmarks have shown that IBM's new
servers will deliver up to twice the performance and four times the virtualization
capabilities as its powerful POWER6, for the same price and energy usage. It does
this by introducing a new advanced modular design that can support up to 64
POWER7 cores. In its announcement, IBM rolled out four servers in the mid-range
and enterprise classes, leaving blade, entry-level, and the big-iron 590 replacements
to come out later this year. It did release one enterprise-level box, the Power 780,
which is a cross between the 570 and 595. One major feature of the 780 is
TurboCore technology, which gives you the option to run the system with fewer
cores to exploit increased cache from other cores on the chip, offering the highest
clock speed of any POWER7 system at 4.1 GHz running in TurboCore mode. This is
twice the power of HP's new Tukwila chip, running at less energy.

TurboCore mode enables workload optimization by dynamically selecting the most

suitable threading mode: single, standard Simultaneous Multi-Threading (two
threads), or SMT with four threads per core. It also comes with Active Memory
Expansion, which allows the effective memory capacity of the system to be much
larger than the actual physical memory of the box—up to 100%. It also offers
intelligent threading and Active Memory Expansion technologies and can take
advantage of Live Partition Mobility as well, which helps migrate users from
Power6-based systems.

In the IBM world, it's all about "virtualization without limits." The new IBM Power 780
can support up to 640 virtual machines because the server itself can support up to
64 cores with 10 virtual machines per core. Later systems will support up to 100
cores and 1000 virtual machines!

How is all of this managed? It's done through VMControl, a virtualization plug-in for
IBM Systems Director that can be used to manage virtualization on POWER7
servers. It exists in Express, Standard, or the Enterprise edition of PowerVM. This
software lets you create and store ready-to-run virtual images in a shared repository.
The standard edition even lets you create and manage system pools, which are
collections of virtual images running on multiple servers, in a way that is as easy as
managing a single LPAR.

Summary
This article discussed the offerings of the top UNIX vendors and compared them to

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IBM. It showed how most of the features available from HP and SUN are already
implemented by IBM on a much grander scale. The article also showed how IBM
solutions are more scalable and mature. While HP has more offerings and a more
mature set of a virtualization featuresets than Sun, it still lacks the scalability and
flexibility of IBM's PowerVM. While Sun has a new name and has made some bold
changes, they still have a long way to go.

During 2009, while Solaris added patch management to virtualization processors

and HP-UX added support for online workload management (integrity machines
only), IBM added Active Memory Sharing to its mix, making IBM the only vendor that
provided a major innovation in its virtualization strategy.

In 2010, IBM has come out with the POWER7, along with multiple servers that run
this chip, and a clear roadmap to the IBM future of virtualization. HP has announced
their new Integrity servers that will use the Tukwila processor. However, no clear
HP-UX roadmap or new virtualization features have been detailed. Sun has nothing
on the horizon. Clearly, IBM owns the past, present, and now future with respect to
UNIX-based virtualization.

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Resources
Learn
• PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p: Introduction and Configuration Fourth
Edition: Read this Redbook for an introduction to PowerVM virtualization
technologies on IBM System p servers.
• Xen is an open source virtual machine monitor (hypervisor) developed by
XenSource. Xen uses what is known as paravirtualization, which typically
requires guest operating system modification, but Xen can take advantage of
virtualization CPUs to support unmodified guest operating systems.
• New to AIX and UNIX?: Visit the "New to AIX and UNIX" page to learn more
about AIX and UNIX.
• AIX Wiki: A collaborative environment for technical information related to AIX.
• Optimizing AIX 5L performance: Tuning network performance, Part 1
(developerWorks, November 2007): Read Part 1 of a three-part series on AIX
networking, which focuses on the challenges of optimizing network
performance.
• For a three-part series on memory tuning on AIX, see Optimizing AIX 5L
performance: Tuning your memory settings, Part 1 (developerWorks, June
2007).
• Read the IBM whitepaper Improving Database Performance with AIX
concurrent I/O.
• Learn about AIX memory affinity support from the IBM System p and AIX
InfoCenter.
• Learn about IBM's Power Architecture: High-Performance Architecture with a
History.
• Read Power to the People; A history of chip making at IBM (developerWorks,
December 2005) for coverage of IBM's power architecture.
• CPU Monitoring and Tuning (developerWorks, March, 2002): Read this article
to learn how standard AIX tools can help you determine CPU bottlenecks.
• For a comprehensive guide about the performance monitoring and tuning tools
that are provided with AIX 5L Version 5.3, see the IBM Redbook AIX 5L
Practical Performance Tools and Tuning Guide.
• Learn what features you can benefit from in AIX 5L Version 5.3, in AIX 5L
Version 5.3: What's in it for you? (developerWorks, June 2005).
• Operating System and Device Management from IBM provides users and
system administrators with complete information that can affect your selection

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of options when performing such tasks as backing up and restoring the system,
managing physical and logical storage, and sizing appropriate paging space.
• The AIX 5L Differences Guide Version 5.3 Edition redbook focuses on the
differences introduced in AIX 5L Version 5.3 when compared to AIX 5L Version
5.2.
• The AIX and UNIX developerWorks zone provides a wealth of information
relating to all aspects of AIX systems administration.
• Open source: Visit the developerWorks Open source zone for extensive how-to
information, tools, and project updates to help you develop with open source
technologies, and use them with IBM products.
• developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with
developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
• Podcasts: Tune in and catch up with IBM technical experts.
Discuss
• Follow developerWorks on Twitter.
• Get involved in the My developerWorks community.
• Participate in the AIX and UNIX forums:
• AIX Forum
• AIX Forum for developers
• Cluster Systems Management
• IBM Support Assistant Forum
• Performance Tools Forum
• Virtualization Forum
• More AIX and UNIX Forums

About the author

Ken Milberg
Ken Milberg, PMP, is a technology writer/site expert for techtarget.com and provides
Linux technical information and support at searchopensource.com. Ken is also a
writer and technical editor for IBM Systems Magazine, Open Edition. He holds a
bachelor's degree in computer and information science, as well as a master's degree
in technology management from the University of Maryland University College. He is
the founder and group leader of the Long Island POWER-AIX users group. Through

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the years, he has worked for both large and small organizations and has held diverse
positions from CIO to Senior AIX Engineer. Today, he works for Future Tech, a Long
Island-based IBM business partner. Ken is a PMI-certified Project Management
Professional (PMP) and an IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert (CATE, IBM
System p5 2006).

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