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Passing the Baton

Live Partition Mobility facilitates live transfers of running workloads

Live Partition Mobility is an exciting PowerVM* virtualization technology that provides live transfer of running workloads from one physical server to another compatible server without application downtime. Much like passing the baton in a relay race, Live Partition Mobility passes applications from one server to another without dropping the baton. Live migration of AIX* or Linux* partitions can help you avoid application interruption for planned system maintenance, provisioning and workload balancing. Live Partition Mobility is a feature of the PowerVM Enterprise Edition system offering.

A Winning Team

Live Partition Mobility allows you to move a running LPAR’s OS and associated running applications between POWER6* processor-based servers. Some common Live Partition Mobility uses include:

• Moving a workload off of a server for scheduled hardware upgrade/maintenance activities, including non-concurrent firmware updates.
• Resource balancing, which might be temporary for end-of-month processing or a permanent relocation to support environment growth or CPU/memory balancing.
• Retirement of a server for lease termination or end of useful service life.

An overview of a sample Live Partition Mobility environment is shown in Figure 1.

Key features of the environment include two POWER6 processor-based servers, virtualized access to SAN storage through the virtual I/O (VIO) server, and virtualized Ethernet network access through the VIO server’s shared Ethernet adapter (SEA).

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