Authors: Ravi Kota (IBM PowerVC – Senior Staff Software Engineer)& Sri Ram Pisupati (IBM PowerVC – Information Development)
Introduction
With the introduction of release 1.3.1, PowerVC adds support for shared processor pools on PowerVM when managed via NovaLink. This allows you to share a group of processors across multiple virtual machines.
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You can group your applications together and set a shared processor pool size limit on the total number of processor units for each pool, which helps control software licensing costs by limiting a set of VMs to a processor pool or subset of the cores on the system.
Notes:
- Initial setup and configuration of the shared processor pools are done outside of PowerVC (instructions below).
- Administrators must ensure that the shared processor pool on the PowerVM host has enough ‘Available’ processing units.
Operating scenarios
Shared processor pools are supported during the following operations:
- Deploy
- Migration
- Remote-restart
- Resize
Specifying a shared processor pool
To specify a shared processor pool for a virtual machine, follow these steps:
- Configure the shared processor pool on the host.
Login to the NovaLink partition using valid credentials and perform the steps below.
- First, identify the existing shared processor pools on the PowerVM host that is managed via NovaLink.
- Create the new shared processor pool, if one does not exist.
- On the PowerVC user interface, create a new compute template or edit an existing one and specify the shared processor pool name.
- While using PowerVC to deploy the virtual machine, select the compute template created in step 2.
- After deployment, the shared processor pool name is listed on the PowerVC virtual machine properties page.
- You can also verify on the host that the virtual machine is associated with the specified shared processor pool.
Here, ‘Test-VM1-41835c88-0000001c’ is the partition name on the host for virtual machine ‘Test-VM1’.
Considerations
Migration and Remote-Restart
When migrating or remote restarting a virtual machine, the name of the shared processor pool associated with the virtual machine must stay the same.
Example If your virtual machine is using shared processor pool ‘SPPTestPool’ on the source host, then the destination host must also be configured with the shared processor pool ‘SPPTestPool’. If it does not exist, then the virtual machine cannot be placed on that host. |
Resize
While resizing a virtual machine, PowerVC does not allow modifications to the shared processor pool name if ‘Processor Mode’ remains the same.
Example If your virtual machine is using shared processor pool ‘SPPTestPool’ then you cannot select a different shared processor pool (for example, ‘OtherSPPTestPool’) while resizing the virtual machine. |
However, you can switch to a different shared processor pool when resizing a virtual machine from dedicated processor mode to shared processor mode.
As you can see, shared processor pools are simple to use on a PowerVM host that is managed via NovaLink within PowerVC. If you have any questions, please add them below. And don’t forget to follow us in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter!