Re: Why do companies partition their Power Servers?

Some rambling...

I agree that there is definitely a need for many to lpar. But, we should
listen to those who question it. There is a benefit, and a cost, to both.
Each of you has to decide on what is best for your business.
While you can often shoehorn into not doing a lpar it can often be more
work than it's worth.
On the other hand, having many lpars can lead to it's own inefficienies.
Islands of disk for one thing. Even if they are all guested, or even if
they are all served by the same SAN, you still now have islands of free
space all tied up by each individual server. These islands of disk is why
our company has never used auxillary storage pools.

While some may decry any OS that doesn't allow you to fit it, and
application data and programs, on a 360k diskette as "bloatware" I will
say that the base IBM i doesn't take that much space. Having recently
prepared one machine for sale and only seeing less than one fourth of one
percent tied up in base OS I consider that insignificant. Ok, granted, it
was a 2+TB system. But geezer contests aside 2TB is what, two to three
currently sized disks?

There is maintenance involved in getting all those releases up to date.

Server consolidation is a current trend. Getting numerous servers to run
under one physical box (as in VMWARE or LPAR) was one step. Actively
seeing if more applications can coexist on the same individual server is
definitely also a hot current trend. Instead of 200 virtual x86 linux
servers why not try to run them all in one Linux lpar under Power 8? Stuff
like this is hitting the news all the time.

Rob Berendt