PowerVC 1.2.2 which was recently released is packed full with added features and supporting many more devices. For those not familiar with PowerVC, is a free (for AIX Enterprise users) advanced virtualization management offering built on OpenStack technology. PowerVC can run on AIX or RHEL and is easy to install. Once PowerVC installs you access the application through a browser.

There are three parts of your environment that PowerVC needs to access. First it will need access to the HMC with the lpars you wish to manage. It is an uncomplicated task to allow access to your lpars. Simply provide PowerVC the ip address of the HMC and provide the necessary credentials. PowerVC does the rest. The second step needed is giving it access to your fibre switches. The third and final step in getting the PowerVC 1.2.2 running on your environment is giving it the needed access to your storage device.

Once you added the necessary devices PowerVC needs to do its magic you can start capturing virtual machines, fast deploy servers, migrate servers, start and stop servers, attach a volume, and remove a volume to name a few things.

With PowerVC 1.2.2 IBM added support to a lot more platforms

  • Cisco SAN Fabrics
  • IBM XIV storage devices
  • EMC VMAX storage devices
  • EMC PowerPath client support
  • IBMi (Requires 7.1 TR7 or 7.2)
  • EMC VNX storage devices
  • RHEL 7
  • SLES12 and Ubuntu v14 (PowerKVM)
  • Third-Party-supported OpenStack storage drivers

PowerVC has a welcoming UI and makes managing your power environment more straightforward. It also automates the entire provisioning process, by creating the zones in your fabric, carving the storage, and mapping the vnics to appropriate vios servers.

If you would like a demo of PowerVC please contact Matt Duvall at mduvall@voltainc.com.