

IBM will be bringing KVM Linux virtualization to Power in 2014 - rbanffy
http://www.zdnet.com/ibm-will-be-bringing-kvm-linux-virtualization-to-power-in-2014-7000024039/#!

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moreentropy
Power has LPARs, so why bother?

If I use Linux on Power by choice, I'm either doing OLAP/OLTP or I'm an AIX
shop that needs a few Linux boxes without the hassle of a completely different
platform (x86) in the mix.

But I can't imagine anyone wants to use IBM Power to host a large number of
Linux KVM VMs, that just doesn't make sense.

~~~
apaprocki
It depends how large you are. Managing physical boxes in a datacenter can be
very expensive. Being able to virtualize on any platform is a good thing, as
you can decide your own balance of costs between physical space, energy,
network gear, network people, operations. These physical costs are often
overlooked when you're talking about hardware. It takes a lot of $ to operate
your own data center.

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ithkuil
I have a better "Why?":

KVM is handy because you can run an unmodified guest. There are many reasons
why somebody would like that, for example to run the latest greatest product
somebody ships as an ISO (or VM) image.

If I understood correctly, KVM on POWER would allow to run unmodified OS
guests built for the POWER architecture.

What's the use case? Where are the tons of pre existing but subtly different
distributions you want to run together but have nobody supporting a couple of
small fixes to let it run in a paravirtualized environment.

I'm genuinely curious about the usual ecosystem that people who run linux on
IBM POWER have to cope with.

~~~
wmf
This is a case where Power differs from x86. Before KVM, PowerVM was mandatory
on Power so every OS ran in a VM and these VMs were all paravirtualized. So
"unmodified" Power OSes are already PV.

~~~
ithkuil
Hence I don't understand what's the point of KVM for the POWER platform. Could
you shed some light?

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csmuk
Why?

POWER is really nice. I mean properly awesome, but no one seems to use it
these days. Even our ex-AIX financial orgs have gone x64 and a lot to
windows...

~~~
ghshephard
I often think of the IBM Power platform as the "Dark Matter" of computing -
nobody we know has ever seen, or used such a system, but it occupies huge
amounts of budgets for computing.

We were joint bidding a $Billion+ project with IBM in 2004/2005, and they lent
us a handful of P5 520s to do some initial development on. They were bizarre
systems, and just trying to get your standard C packages to compile under AIX
was a painful chore for someone used to the portability on Solaris/Linux/BSD
back then. Heck, even Irix was easier.

Happy to hear that there is more weight going into KVM, I almost thought that
platform had died under the Tsunami of VMware and Xen (Amazon). Nice to know
there will be some real competition.

~~~
elehack
KVM is used, a lot: it is the backbone of Red Hat's virtualization in RHEL6.
Also, if you create a new VM using Gnome Boxes, you will have a KVM VM unless
you go out of your way.

~~~
ghshephard
Re: "KVM is used a lot" \- Our company actually standardized on KVM about 7
years ago, and, then, after about three years of realizing we weren't facebook
scale, spent the next couple years migrating everything to VMware.

Running your stack on KVM is like running your IPSec concentrators on OpenBSD
(been there, done that) - it makes an awful lot of sense technically,
particularly to the people who are actually using it every day - but, from the
perspective of the enterprise - No Support ecosystem, No market presence, Poor
compatibility testing. One of the best things ever for Linux in the enterprise
was RHEL/SUSE and their corporate support for the platform.

I'm willing to wager 90%+ of the virtualization market in the fortune 500s is
VMware, and KVM has next to zero market penetration.

I'm hoping that changes with the broad market support we're starting to see
from IBM and the various open stack alliances.

~~~
elehack
Anyone using RHEL6's built-in virtualization technology is using KVM, it's
just all wrapped up in libvirt stuff. Those tools were in early development 7
years ago.

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pm215
The article says "Unfortunately, KVM only works on Intel and AMD processors";
actually it works also on S390, Power and ARM, though different archs are at
different places in the "initial prototype" to "production ready" spectrum. I
think what they're actually talking about here is the fact that IBM are ready
to ship it as a supported product and get distros to do so too.

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yeukhon
Who actually use IBM's Power these days? And SPARC? I see ARM, AMD and Intel
only.

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apaprocki
I do :)

~~~
yeukhon
Why do you guys [I assume Bloomberg] use POWERS or SPARC?

~~~
apaprocki
Probably like any of their other customers, there is a framework which was
developed that runs on big-endian hardware and the development cost to certify
(read: not the porting work) that calculations are correct if switched to x86
is not necessarily worth it as long as the machines follow Moore's law just
like any other hardware.

These machines represent a tiny tiny portion of overall machines, but have
certain properties that make them nice for certain functions. They can handle
a lot of I/O and can reduce software complexity for certain jobs which
actually don't need to scale horizontally.

