IBM Power vs. IBM PowerVM

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Power
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Power product line is a family of servers.N/A
IBM PowerVM
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM PowerVM provides a server virtualization environment.N/A
Pricing
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Considered Both Products
IBM Power
Chose IBM Power
IBM Power servers are more secure and offer more reliability than the HPE solution. It is also much more scalable and can grow with the organization's needs. HPE's server solution can too, but it is more 'clunky' and requires more configuration, whereas IBM's Power servers seem …
Chose IBM Power
IBM Power servers are reliable and provide all the utility and performance required.
Chose IBM Power
1. Cost effective 2.Highly scalable 3.Fantastic performance.
Chose IBM Power
We did not try any other similar offering.
Chose IBM Power
The performance, reliability and scalability offered by IBM Power servers were no match for others. And the other lacked in the self service suites and softwares for effective management of the infrastructure. Also the others are not robust enough to take our workload. The …
Chose IBM Power
Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others...
Power server do not need to have release often
power server are much more strong then other manufacturer
Chose IBM Power
Due to pricing complexity, multiple pricing models, and the potential for unexpected costs if resources are not properly managed, my organization finds it difficult to anticipate and control AWS expenses. IBM Power Server with Cost Administration empowers my organization to …
Chose IBM Power
There is simply no comparison, power systems are at an infinitely higher level in reliability, availability and serviceability.
Chose IBM Power
For tier 1 clinical applications, there are generally two platform choices. AIX on Power and RHEL on VMwware or some other Hypervisor. When we purchased EPIC and Soft, AIX on Power was either the only option or the leading UNIX option. At the time Linux was not offered. Today …
Chose IBM Power
We always buy IBM Power/Aix systems for our business-critical applications, because we like to sleep sound at night. There's always Dell & HP for our VMware setup which runs a bunch of RHEL servers.
Chose IBM Power
The IBM power systems are really appreciable all the time, and there are many types of powerful servers, and all of the servers are unique. Each one has its own specialty. The big difference that we saw is about the latency itself, and it seems to be like all the other …
Chose IBM Power
It was not working properly remotely and also some features were missing that's why we switch to ibm power servers and find it really awesome. Dell poweredge R emitting lot of noise and heat up servers also. Starting it up was very complicated.
Chose IBM Power
IBM Power servers are the best server available in the market mainly due to the secure environment they provide, easy deployment with no downtime, AI support, powerful processor for extended workloads and high performance with fewer servers. These all features make it an easy …
Chose IBM Power
We chose to go with buying our own hardware and co-locating it because it was lower cost overall.
Chose IBM Power
It really depends on each client and what they have regarding hardware and software. If the client has a partnership with IBM or is using IBM software, usually they go with IBM hardware. If the client is a Dell partner, it usually goes with Dell hardware running Linux, and so on.
Chose IBM Power
The main advantage is that it keeps complicated environments and apps in use included. Other servers either wouldn't allow me to use them or wouldn't let me use them smoothly enough, but this server was heavy and packed with features.
IBM PowerVM
Chose IBM PowerVM
IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features …
Chose IBM PowerVM
Very similar, just supporting different operating system environments. Both products are rock solid and well supported. Both products have a surrounding group of other management products that are tested and integrated to provide a comfortable group of system support …
Chose IBM PowerVM
Our company utilizes VMware and PowerVM. VMware is very user friendly from an IT support view and makes supporting Windows OS easier. PowerVM is moving in that direction. PowerVM is better in that you can prioritize workloads across different VMs and be granular in your …
Features
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power
-
Ratings
IBM PowerVM
8.6
Ratings
5% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Small Businesses
Dell PowerEdge
Dell PowerEdge
Score 10.0 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 5.9 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM PowerIBM PowerVM
Likelihood to Recommend
Large-scale data centers that place a premium on high performance, dependability, and scalability benefit greatly from IBM Power servers. They are perfect for hosting vital databases, virtualized workloads, and applications. Organizations like ours dealing with big data analytics, data warehousing, and AI/machine learning workloads benefit from Power servers' ability to process and analyze vast datasets efficiently.
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IBM PowerVM only is available on IBM POWER machines. It makes live much easier, compared to bare metal machines (OPAL) or machines with KVM. Personally I would not like to manage systems that don't have IBM PowerVM. The current line-up always includes IBM PowerVM (firmware built-in).
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Pros
  • The systems are physically able to keep the systems operating and producing.
  • The AIX operating system is stable and secure both Firmware and Software.
  • IBM Power servers support many applications for the customer re: Oracle, DB2, and many Power grid systems.
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  • IBM PowerVM is reliable and fully redundant with no single points of failure
  • Once it is set up, there is not a lot of maintenance that needs to be done on it
  • It gives you a lot flexibility by using features like LPM
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Cons
  • A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has.
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  • Each LPAR comes with a profile that sets a minimum, desired and maximum capacity (like for CPU). You can freely change the allocated CPU between the minimum and maximum on-the-fly. If you want to change the resource below the set minimum or above the set maximum, you need to shutdown the partition first and change the profile. It would be nice if there was a way to do that without downtime too.
  • (Setting the maximum very high is fine for CPU but not for memory as it allocates a fixed percentage of the maximum (not the current) size for internal housekeeping).
  • When you manage your Power system with an HMC, a lot of firmware updates can be done concurrent (on-the-fly), not requiring a power-cycle of the machine. If you use Novalink to manage your systems, this proces becomes broken and you need downtime on your physical system. You can use Live Partition Mobility to move every partition off of this system first, but still...
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Likelihood to Renew
This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
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The product works. It provides the proven environment to support IBM's primary operating systems that run on the IBM Power processing systems. This by extension includes the IBM various storage products that work within that environment. It has proven to be seamless as the environment has grown and as various new products and version updates have been added. As with most IBM products, the support is excellent.
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Usability
IBM Power allows us to host and scale up to 32TB of Virtual Machine (VM). We were earlier limited to 12TB per single VM, and could only scale-out (or horizontally). Since some of our solutions are extensively memory intensive, we wanted to host larger VM.We are SAP only shop, given some SAP solutions are memory intensive and some industries need to exploit 'memory intensive' IBM Power was the only choice to scale architecture beyond 12TB memory with support for High Availability design as well! This has drastically improved the time we had to spend on optimizing the applications, solution and database.
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Since it is built into the firmware (hardware) it requires no separate installation (except for the Virtual I/O servers, if you need those). Both HMC and Novalink (with PowerVC) support IBM PowerVM well and offer a user-friendly interface to setting up LPARs and making changes, most on the fly. Modern systems also give insights into performance, power consumption etc. A lot of separate tools exist to show more details, like LPAR2RRD, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic etc.
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Reliability and Availability
In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
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No answers on this topic
Performance
The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
Read full review
IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features like LPM, shared processor pool...etc, which makes the environment more flexible.
Read full review
Scalability
This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • IBM Powers servers have consistently delivered uninterrupted operation in our datacenters. They have redundancy and fault tolerance feature ensuring maximum uptime and minimal disruptions.
  • They can handle computationally intensive workloads efficiently, reducing simulation times and enabling faster decision making.
  • They are energy efficient, helping us reduce carbon footprint while delivering top-notch performance.
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  • It has provided the performance we need during month end and year end closing cycles.
  • It has been very reliable with little to no downtime.
  • We have been able to stretch our IT dollars because the refresh rate on IBM Power can run for years. Also, we have been able to add many more VMs to physical machines than other platforms can run.
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ScreenShots

IBM Power Screenshots

Screenshot of IBM Power E1180Screenshot of IBM Power E1150Screenshot of IBM Power S1124Screenshot of IBM Power S1122