Virtual IO Server (VIOS) and IBM I

Introduction

With the continuous development of information technology, each enterprise IT infrastructure is also moving towards virtualization, large data, cloud computing and other streamlining, integration trend. Virtualization technology becomes particularly important. Today we want to introduce you to the Power server virtualization technology in a small part of the virtual IO server, referred to as VIOS. The legend then illustrates some of the technical points of the virtual IO server and IBM I interconnect.

In order to get a better understanding of virtual IO Server, we start from the bottom concept of virtual IO server PowerVM. The concept of PowerVM is simply the virtualization technology of the IBM Power host. This virtualization technology enables us to create AIX,IBM I and Linux application environments more flexibly, PowerVM between the operating system and the underlying hardware, such as (Figure 1).

Figure 1. IBM Power Server Virtualization Technology Location Map

PowerVM provides an industrialized virtualization solution for IBM power servers and blade servers, and PowerVM is a large family with virtualization technologies such as Hypervisor, differential zones, dynamic memory sharing, shared Ethernet adapters, dynamic partitioning migrations, etc. For example (Figure 2), users can use these technologies selectively to serve customer partitions based on their actual needs, PowerVM has 3 major editions, compact, Standard and Enterprise editions, and different versions of virtualization features, which can be referenced at the end of the article. PowerVM is able to virtualize the Power host's processor, memory, storage, and I/O resources for customer partitioning, enabling our power mainframe to take full advantage of, in other words, making every penny available.

Virtualization Technology composition and architecture for IBM power servers

Figure 2. IBM Power Server Virtualization technology is the main component

Virtual IO Server is an important part of PowerVM virtualization technology, which is both a software application and a separate partition on the power host, which can run any type of power server after the POWER5 or Power5 of the Virtualization standard feature is activated. On The virtual IO server provides virtual storage and network resources for one or more client partitions. By using the virtual IO server, we can fully utilize the power host's resources, allocate all resources except memory and CPU to VIOS management, and then provide the corresponding network and storage resources according to the different requirements of the customer partition. Of course, we can also use virtual IO servers to provide the necessary technical support for some of the more complex PowerVM virtualization technologies, such as active partition migration (LPM) and vmcontrol implementation of partitioned rapid deployment.

Now that the virtual IO server is a separate logical partition, it takes up the resources of the system and, referring to the table below, we can see the minimum resource requirements required by the virtual IO server, as shown in table 1:

Let's take a look at the virtual IO server from the following diagram (Figure 3):

Figure 3. Virtual IO Server architecture diagram

Above (Figure 3), there are 4 customer partitions, a virtual IO server, and an external device.

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