PowerVM

After all this offerings from Oracle, Sun and so on, IBM had something to do about virtualisation: And IBM does what they do everytime in this case … bundling old products into something new. For example their new PowerVM offering. It´s just the virtualisation of the Power processors bundled with some code from Transitive to execute x86 code on a Power CPU. I´m not really convinced about such a bundle. To do virtualisation for x86 on Power looks like a marketing stunt for me. Why should i buy an expensive Power system to virtualize Linux x86 systems? Even at 2000$ socket for VMware it´s vastly cheaper to buy a x86 server in the first place. And this doesn´t take support from ISV into consideration. But at the end: You can say everything about IBM, but you can´t say that they have a bad marketing department. PS: By the way … LDOMS or Containers on Solaris goes for $0 … beat this, IBM ;)