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Chapter 2. Architecture and technical overview 57
Virtual I/O Server version 1.3
Virtual I/O Server version 1.3 brings a host of new enhancements, including improved
monitoring such as additional topas and viostat performance metrics and the bundling of the
Performance ToolKit (PTX®) agent. Virtual SCSI and Virtual Ethernet performance
increases, and command line enhancements and the enablement of additional storage
solutions are also included.
Virtual I/O Server version 1.3 introduced several enhancements for Virtual SCSI and shared
Fibre Channel adapter support:
Independent Software Vendor/Independent Hardware Vendor Virtual I/O enablement
iSCSI TOE adapter
iSCSI directly attached n3700 storage subsystem
HP storage
Virtual SCSI functional enhancements:
– Support for SCSI Reserve/Release for limited configurations
– Changeable queue depth
– Updating virtual device capacity non-disruptively so that the virtual disk can "grow"
without requiring a reconfig
– Configurable fast fail time (number of retries on failure)
– Error log enhancements
Virtual I/O Server version 1.3 also introduced several enhancements for virtual Ethernet and
shared ethernet adapter support, including TCP/IP Acceleration: Large Block Send.
2.12.4 Partition Load Manager
Partition Load Manager (PLM) provides automated processor and memory distribution
between a dynamic LPAR and a Micro-Partitioning technology capable logical partition
running AIX 5L. The PLM application is based on a client/server model to share system
information, such as processor or memory events, across the concurrent present logical
partitions.
The following events are registered on all managed partition nodes:
Memory-pages-steal high thresholds and low thresholds
Memory-usage high thresholds and low thresholds
Processor-load-average high threshold and low threshold
2.12.5 Integrated Virtualization Manager
In order to ease virtualization technology adoption in any IBM System p5 environment, IBM
has developed Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) — a simplified hardware
Important: We do not recommend using Mirrored Logical Volumes (LVs) on the Virtual I/O
Server level for as backing devices. If mirroring is required, two independent devices
(possibly from two separate VIO servers) should be assigned to the client partition, and
then the client partition should define mirroring on top of them.
Note: PLM is supported on AIX 5L Version 5.2 and AIX 5L Version 5.3. It is not supported
on Linux.