Edit: I still regularly speed up my videos. Some links no longer work.
Originally posted August 2, 2016 on AIXchange
By now you’re familiar with PowerVC. No? Well, then this post is for you:
“IBM PowerVC Virtualization Center is an advanced virtualization and cloud management offering, built on OpenStack, that provides simplified virtualization management and cloud deployments for IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux virtual machines (VMs) running on IBM Power Systems. PowerVC is designed to improve administrator productivity and simplify the cloud management of VMs on Power Systems servers. PowerVC provides the foundation for Power Systems scalable cloud management, including integration to higher-level cloud orchestrators based on OpenStack technology.
PowerVC helps Power Systems customers lower their total cost of ownership with a simplified user experience that allows simple cloud deployment and movement of workloads and policies to maximize resource utilization. PowerVC has been built to require little or no training to accelerate cloud deployments on Power Systems. PowerVC has the capability to manage the existing infrastructure by automatically capturing information, such as existing VM definitions, storage, network and server configuration information.
PowerVC allows clients to capture and manage a library of VM images, enabling IT managers to quickly deploy a VM environment by launching a stored image of that environment, instead of having to manually recreate a particular environment. By saving virtual images and centralizing image management, IT managers and administrators can migrate and move virtual images to available systems to expedite deployment.”
This IBM Redpiece — that’s a Redbook that’s still in draft form — has a great deal of good information. It covers the latest version of PowerVC, Version 1.3.1.
Nigel Griffiths has also posted a series of PowerVC videos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
This is a video by PowerVC developer Ana Santos:
There’s also this recent webinar. View the replay here. It’s part of the “IBM Power Systems Technical Webinar Series (including Power Systems Virtualization – PowerVM).” Yep, that whole thing is the name of the webinar series. Catchy, huh? Go here for the slides.
Here’s a session from back in January (slides and replay).
If you’re using the older version of PowerVC, the AIX Virtual User Group did a PowerVC demo in December 2013 (slides and replay). I expect the VUG will have an update on this in the near future.
Finally, there’s the PowerVC cheat sheet, courtesy of Nigel and the AIXpert blog. The same site has this older piece as well.
The trick to getting PowerVC installed in your environment is having a licensed copy of Redhat Linux for either Power or x86. That way, you can install packages from repositories other than those found on the installation DVD. In the future I’ll get further into installation, but I thought it would be helpful to present these resources first.
Another trick: If you find it daunting to watch these long videos, you can download Google Chrome plugins. Start by searching for “video speed controller” or “youtube playback speed control.” These allow you to speed up YouTube videos to, typically, 1.5X or 1.75X playback speeds. Even at the faster speed, you should still be able to understand what’s being said. Assuming you aren’t overly annoyed by the audio, you can save significant time digesting the information.