Looking to save on licensing costs? Oracle, Sybase, or others? PowerVM, exclusively available on IBM Power servers, allows for the creation of shared processor pools with fine control over processor usage resulting in a reduction in the total number of CPU's required by an enterprise.

If you are currently using Intel based servers without VMware, most vendors will require you to license all the processors in the system – regardless how many your software is currently using. If you are running linux – try this: run “cat /proc/loadavg” to display the average CPU usage over 1, 5 and 15 minutes. In the vast majority of systems, the CPU load rarely exceeds the number of CPU's in the system. However, you are paying licenses for all those unused CPU's.

With VMware, the situation gets better. With VMware the system can be carved out and processors can be assigned to specific virtual machines. This allows for better CPU allocation and in most cases, a slight reduction in the license costs based on CPU's.

Now consider the following scenario – system 'A' is an interactive database that is updated and queried frequently during the day. It requires 6 CPU's to support the current user load. System 'B' is the overnight batch system that includes a historical reporting database that interacts with a variety of systems within the enterprise. System 'B' requires 6 CPU's to complete the overnight batch cycle. To fully license both systems, 12 CPU licenses will be required for your databases.

PowerVM solves this problem with Processor Pools. In the above scenario, the administrator would build 2 virtual machines (or LPAR's) that share a processor pool of 6 CPU's based on the total required CPU usage when both systems are running. In this scenario, the interactive system is rarely used overnight while batch system requires most of it's CPU cycles – now the company only needs to purchase 6 licenses.

This is a simple scenario of what actually happens in an enterprise, yet PowerVM has the fine control to handle even the most complicated scenarios. Virtual Machines are allocated by a 1/10th of a core with minimum and maximum CPU limits. Administrators can even cap and weight CPU usage so processes do not take up all the CPU's in a pool.

The introduction of PowerVM in the enterprise usually results in a significant reduction in the number of database licenses. In some cases, the savings in license costs will pay for the upgraded hardware in less than 1 year!



Paul Short
Director of Engineering
Integration Systems