AIX 6.1 - Workload Partitions (WPARs)

AIX 6.1 - Workload Partitions (WPARs)

Virtualization unquestionably saves a lot of money on power and cooling. The more partitions you can carve on your existing systems, the better utilization you will have. WPAR, a new innovation of AIX 6.1, allow for operating systems virtualization, outside of traditional hypervisor-based logical partitioning. In essence, it allows you to carve up multiple workload environments inside of one host and OS kernel. So you can now have one single instance of AIX 6.1 and using WPARs you can have four different test environments working within that instance, appearing like separate operating system instances. Prior to WPARs, you would need to carve out separate logical partitions (LPARs) within the physical server.

This new feature of AIX 6.1 has the effect of reducing the amount of physical devices necessary to support your logical environments. Though one can conceivably get by with the bare minimum of physical devices for a logical partition, the WPAR is clearly the most efficient means that you can use when creating a new environment. This is purely an AIX innovation, unrelated to the POWER6. Furthermore, Live Application Mobility, another AIX 6.1 innovation, allows you to relocate running WPARs from one LPAR to another. IBM is the first vendor that allows for this feature without having to shut down the application or partition. This helps promote energy savings by allowing datacenter operators to move around workloads in such a way as to allow physical servers to sleep during non-peak periods. This feature is available on Power5™ servers and even Power4™ as well!