LPAR issue

Hey Al (and anyone else who has an opinion <grin>)!

I've been advised that within an LPAR'd system the partitions don't
necessarily work and play with one another.  For example, you cannot share
tape drives or optical drives.  You cannot share Ethernet cards.  Different
partitions must have their own RAID arrays.

If someone is trying to use an LPAR to reduce the cost of having multiple
iSeries boxes, it seems that duplication of hardware like this could be a
significant cost.  I'd much rather be able to "pool" my hardware resources
like I can on any decent Microsoft network and share them among my
partitions.

Is my information correct, and if so, is my opinion misguided?  (Well, more
misguided than usual?)

Joe