When we talk about virtualization and its history, we have to talk about IBM and the old mainframe days. IBM introduced virtualization technology to market some 40 years ago. And now, the company is repackaging its Unix Advanced Power Virtualization (APV) software that has been around since 2004 into a new product offering called PowerVM. With IBM's PowerVM virtualization platform, customers can create up to 160 When we talk about virtualization and its history, we have to talk about IBM and the old mainframe days. IBM introduced virtualization technology to market some 40 years ago. And now, the company is repackaging its Unix Advanced Power Virtualization (APV) software that has been around since 2004 into a new product offering called PowerVM.With IBM’s PowerVM virtualization platform, customers can create up to 160 virtual partitions in a single system, which dramatically improves the utilization of the server.PowerVM Express is specifically designed for small and medium sized businesses and is reasonably priced at $40. The Express edition is designed for three LPARS per server. In addition, the company also offers Standard and Enterprise editions that allow ten LPARS per server socket. “Virtualization has typically been in the domain of large enterprises. Today we aim to simplify the adoption of virtualization technologies, making it available to small and medium-sized businesses,” said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. “The capabilities we deliver when combining IBM’s leadership virtualization software and POWER6 technology in our new offerings take us beyond just world-class performance and allow us to help clients build more efficient businesses by saving time, space and money.”PowerVM now has the ability to implement live migration of a virtual machine similar to VMware’s VMotion technology. IBM calls it Live Partition Mobility, and it moves a single LPARS workload or all LPARS workloads from one physical host server to another without any interruption to the user. Although SMB customers interested in PowerVM Express may be upset, this feature is only found on the Enterprise edition of PowerVM, priced at $1,500.Another feature found is Lx86, which allows an IBM System p server to run Linux x86 binary applications unmodified without recompilation, in addition to UNIX and Linux on POWER applications. This feature is offered in all three editions at no additional charge as an incentive to get x86 server users to consolidate on to System p servers. Lx86 is a product of Transitive Corp. that was shown in Beta as the Application Virtual Environment. According to IBM, nearly 70 percent of IBM POWER6 processor-based System p servers use PowerVM technology today. Software Development