Edit: Still useful to know about
Originally posted June 25, 2019 on AIXchange
Those of you who are running E980 servers should be aware of this announcement:
IBM Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 is a new IBM Power E980 offering designed to deliver enhanced multisystem resource sharing and by-the-minute consumption of on-premises Power E980 compute resources to clients deploying and managing a private cloud infrastructure.
All installed processors and memory on servers in a Power Enterprise Pool (2.0) are activated and made available for immediate use when a pool is started. There is no need to reallocate mobile resources from server to server.
System capacity may be seamlessly made available when it is needed without requiring human awareness or intervention.
Permanent, Capacity Upgrade on Demand processor and memory activations (Base Capacity) and corresponding license entitlements are purchased on each Power E980 system. These Base Processor and Memory Activation resources are then aggregated across a pool.
Unpurchased (inactive upon shipment) processor and memory capacity in the pool is activated when a pool is started and can subsequently be used on a pay-as-you-go basis (Metered Capacity) from Capacity Credits purchased from IBM or an authorized IBM Business Partner.
Processor resource within a pool is tracked by the minute, based on actual consumption by shared processor partitions.
Memory resource within a pool is tracked by the minute, based on the assignment of resources to partitions, not based on operating system usage of the memory.
Metered Capacity consumption on one system may be offset by idle Base Capacity elsewhere in the pool during the same period.
A single Power Enterprise Pool (2.0) may support up to 500 shared processor partitions across up to 16 Power E980 systems within a single enterprise, within a single country.
Each Power Enterprise Pool (2.0) is monitored and managed from a Cloud Management Console in the IBM Cloud.
Capacity Credits may be purchased from IBM, an authorized IBM Business Partner, or online through the IBM Entitled System Support website, where available.
Clients may more easily identify capacity usage and trends across their Power E980 systems in a pool by viewing web-accessible aggregated data without spreadsheets or custom analysis tools.
So rather than manually activate resources and dynamically move LPARs or CPU or memory entitlements around the physical machines in your environment, capacity is simply available. And you use it.
Depending on which systems and LPARs are busy, you could theoretically establish offsetting usage patterns—e.g., one machine is busy during the day and one handles the off hours. If you exceed your base resources across your whole pool—say, if all systems are busy at once—you’d be billed on a metered basis for the resources you temporarily use.
Power Enterprise Pools is an interesting solution that’s worth considering for your environment.