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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I often think of the IBM Power platform as the "Dark Matter" of computing - nobody we know has ever seen, or used such a system, but it occupies huge amounts of budgets for computing.

We were joint bidding a $Billion+ project with IBM in 2004/2005, and they lent us a handful of P5 520s to do some initial development on. They were bizarre systems, and just trying to get your standard C packages to compile under AIX was a painful chore for someone used to the portability on Solaris/Linux/BSD back then. Heck, even Irix was easier.

Happy to hear that there is more weight going into KVM, I almost thought that platform had died under the Tsunami of VMware and Xen (Amazon). Nice to know there will be some real competition.

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Bizarre it is, at least to someone who is used to a modern environment. I once hat a gig setting up a open source softare stack on AIX, it was very painful to do. AIX admins aren't really helpful either because their knowledge is really domain specific and everything they usually run is well documented / supported by IBM.

For anything open source related on AIX, http://www.perzl.org/aix/ is a lifesaver.

But, the hardware just scales brutally. You can add/remove LUNs/CPUs/RAM from LPARs without interrupting operations. The Powers hosting the machines I worked on were basically bought, installed and switched on and are now up and running until they are decommissioned years later.

KVM is used, a lot: it is the backbone of Red Hat's virtualization in RHEL6. Also, if you create a new VM using Gnome Boxes, you will have a KVM VM unless you go out of your way.

Re: "KVM is used a lot" - Our company actually standardized on KVM about 7 years ago, and, then, after about three years of realizing we weren't facebook scale, spent the next couple years migrating everything to VMware.

Running your stack on KVM is like running your IPSec concentrators on OpenBSD (been there, done that) - it makes an awful lot of sense technically, particularly to the people who are actually using it every day - but, from the perspective of the enterprise - No Support ecosystem, No market presence, Poor compatibility testing. One of the best things ever for Linux in the enterprise was RHEL/SUSE and their corporate support for the platform.

I'm willing to wager 90%+ of the virtualization market in the fortune 500s is VMware, and KVM has next to zero market penetration.

I'm hoping that changes with the broad market support we're starting to see from IBM and the various open stack alliances.

Anyone using RHEL6's built-in virtualization technology is using KVM, it's just all wrapped up in libvirt stuff. Those tools were in early development 7 years ago.

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