Power hosts are cloud minicomputer resources offered on demand. The system provides PowerVM-based power hosts and power host management features. By offering software and hardware environments identical to physical hosts, power hosts can help you develop and deploy network applications that use the Power architecture.
A minicomputer uses a reduced construction set. The performance and price of minicomputers are between those of PCs and mainframes. UNIX servers are typical minicomputers.
PowerVM provides the industrial-strength virtualization solution for IBM Power Systems servers and blades. The architecture of PowerVM includes the following layers:
Physical layer—Physical resources such as CPUs, memory, and I/O adapters.
Microcode layer—Hypervisor that directs communication between the physical layer and operating system layer, physical resource allocation, and inter-logical partition communication. The microcode layer is the core component of PowerVM virtualization technologies.
Operating system layer—Also called the logical partition layer. An IBM Power server supports running multiple operating systems. Each operating system and its resource definition files form a logical partition (LPAR). An LPAR has dedicated physical CPU, memory, and I/O resources and can act as an independent server to run applications.
Images are sources of power host operating systems. The system offers public and private images
Table-1 Images
|
Image type |
Description |
|
Public |
Created by a system administrator and available to all users in the system. |
|
Private |
Created by an organization administrator and available only to members of an organization. A private image created by a system administrator is available only to system administrators. |
|
Service |
Relationship |
|
Classic network |
Classic networks provide secure flexible private networks for power hosts. |
|
Image |
Images provide operating systems for power hosts. You also can convert power host snapshots into images. |
|
Cloud disk |
Power hosts use cloud disks as data disks. |