IBM® Power Virtualization Center (IBM® PowerVC™) is an advanced, enterprise virtualization management offering for IBM Power Systems™. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces IBM PowerVC and helps you understand its functions, planning, installation, and setup.

IBM PowerVC Version 1.3.1 supports both large and small deployments, either by managing IBM PowerVM® that is controlled by the Hardware Management Console (HMC) or by IBM PowerVM Novalink, or by managing PowerKVM directly. With this capability, IBM PowerVC can manage IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux workloads that run on IBM POWER® hardware, including IBM PurePower systems.

IBM PowerVC is available as a Standard Edition, or as a Cloud PowerVC Manager edition.

IBM PowerVC Standard Edition includes the following features and benefits:

IBM Cloud PowerVC Manager includes all of the IBM PowerVC Standard Edition features and adds:

This publication is for experienced users of IBM PowerVM and other virtualization solutions who want to understand and implement the next generation of enterprise virtualization management for Power Systems.

Unless stated otherwise, the content of this publication refers to IBM PowerVC Version 1.3.1.

This book was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center.

Guillermo Corti is an IT Architect at IBM Argentina. He has been with IBM since 2004 and has 22 years experience with Power Systems and AIX. He has a degree in Systems from Moron University and 11 years of experience working in service delivery for North American accounts. His areas of expertise include Power Systems, AIX, IBM Linux on Power, and IBM PowerVM solutions.

Mika Heino is a Client Technical Specialist working in IBM Lab Services in IBM Finland for local and international IBM accounts. He has a degree of Telecommunications and Computer Science from Turku University of Applied Sciences. Mika has more than 15 years experience with Intel servers and server virtualization, over 10 years of experience with storage area network (SAN) networking and IBM Storage Systems, and over 5 years of experience on IBM Power Systems with Linux, AIX, and IBM i.

Paul Sonnenberg is a Software Engineer working in the Custom Test Partnership at the IBM Development Lab in Poughkeepsie NY. He has over 20 years experience working with IBM Power systems. He has worked in the customer benchmarking center and on the Power Platform Evaluation Test (pPET) team, focusing on application development and enablement on the Power Systems platform. Most recently, he has been working with IBM PowerVC, using it as a tool to deploy and scale complex customer-like applications.

The project that created this publication was managed by:
Scott Vetter, PMP

Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this project:

Dave Archer, Senthil Bakthavachalam, David Bennin, Luis Bolinches, Eric Brown, Kenneth Burger, Chun Shi Chang, Rich Conway, Joe Cropper, Rebecca Dimock, William Edmonds, Chris Bigson, Nigel Griffiths, Nicolas Guérin, Kyle Henderson, Philippe Hermes, Amy Hieter, Greg Hintermeister, Thierry Huche, Bhrugubanda Jayasankar, Liang Jiang, Kyle Johnson, Bobichan (Bobby) John, Monica O Joshi, Imranuddin W Kazi, Rishika Kedia, Sailaja Keshireddy, Yan Koyfman, Jay Kruemcke, Bob McNamara, Samuel D. Matzek, Gerald McBrearty, Luvella McFadden, John R. Niemi, Geraint North, Minh Nguyen, Sujeet Pai, Atul Patel, Carl Pecinovsky Taylor Peoples, Antoni Pioli, Osvaldo Rodriguez, Jeremy Salsman, Douglas Sanchez, Edward Shvartsman, Anna Sortland, Brent Tang, Jeff Tenner, Andrew Thorstensen, Stephen Tremain, Ramesh Veeramala, Christine Wang, Stephen Whitted, Barry Williams, Michael Williams

Thanks to the authors of the previous editions of this book. The authors of the first and second edition, IBM PowerVC Version 1.2.0 and 1.2.1 Introduction and Configuration, which was published in October 2014, were Bruno Blanchard, Guillermo Corti, Sylvain Delabarre, Ho Jin Kim, Ondrej Plachy, Marcos Quezada, and Gustavo Santos. The authors of the third edition, IBM PowerVC Version 1.2.3 Introduction and Configuration, which was published in October 2015, were Marco Barboni, Guillermo Corti, Benoit Creau, and Liang Hou Xu.

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