# IBM Power VM Reviews **Vendor:** IBM **Category:** [Server Virtualization Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/server-virtualization) **Average Rating:** 4.7/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 26 ## About IBM Power VM IBM PowerVM is a robust virtualization solution designed for IBM Power Systems, enabling the creation and management of multiple virtual machines (VMs) running AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. By consolidating workloads onto fewer servers, PowerVM enhances resource utilization, reduces operational costs, and provides a secure, scalable environment for critical applications. Key Features and Functionality: - Micro-Partitioning: Supports up to 20 dynamic logical partitions per processor core, allowing for efficient resource allocation and high server utilization. - Live Partition Mobility: Enables the migration of active partitions between servers without downtime, facilitating maintenance and load balancing. - Active Memory Sharing: Dynamically reallocates memory among VMs, optimizing memory usage and improving performance. - Secure Virtualization: Provides a secure environment with industry-leading hypervisor technology, ensuring the integrity and isolation of applications and I/O. - Dynamic Resource Optimization: Automatically adjusts processor, memory, and I/O resources across VMs to meet changing workload demands. Primary Value and Solutions Provided: PowerVM addresses the challenges of underutilized servers and escalating operational costs by enabling businesses to consolidate multiple workloads onto fewer systems. This consolidation leads to increased server utilization, reduced hardware and energy expenses, and simplified management. The advanced features of PowerVM, such as Live Partition Mobility and Active Memory Sharing, ensure high availability and performance of applications, while its secure virtualization environment protects critical workloads. By leveraging PowerVM, organizations can achieve a more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective IT infrastructure. ## IBM Power VM Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **efficiency** of IBM PowerVM, benefiting from a reliable and scalable virtualization environment. (1 reviews) - Users value the **reliability** of IBM PowerVM for delivering a secure and efficient virtualization environment. (1 reviews) - Users value the **scalability** of IBM Power VM, enabling efficient management across various environments and workloads. (1 reviews) - Users value the **strong isolation and security** of IBM Power VM, ensuring a reliable virtualization environment. (1 reviews) - Users value the **reliable and secure virtualization environment** offered by IBM Power VM for diverse systems. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face a **difficult learning curve** with IBM Power VM due to required training and varying features across systems. (1 reviews) - Users face a **steep learning curve** with IBM Power VM, needing training due to varying features across systems. (1 reviews) ## IBM Power VM Reviews ### 1. PowerVM is a Reliable, Available & Secured virtualization platform for mission-critical workloads **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shahid S. | IBM Power Systems Brand Leader, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2025 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** IBM PowerVM provides a reliable, secure, scalable, efficient, and highly available virtualization environment for IBM Power Systems for running IBM AIX, IBM i, and various Linux distributions. Key features like Dynamic LPars, Micro-pratitioning, Live Partition Mobility, Shared Processor Pools, Strong Isolation and Security, and many more, position IBM PowerVM as a leader in Virtualization marketplace. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** HMC and PowerVC requires training for new users. Only available for IBM Power Systems. Features and functionality can vary on different operating systems (AIX, IBM i and Linux). **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use IBM PowerVM to run multiple virtual machines on our IBM Power Systems infrastructure. It allows us to run multiple workloads; such as Oracle databases, legacy SAP applications, and test environments — on a single server, which helps us reduce hardware costs and improve efficiency. Currently, we are deploying SAP HANA in-memory database and S/4HANA applications on IBM Power10 systems. PowerVM enables us to create flexible and secure partitions (LPARs) tailored to these high-performance workloads. We have been using an older version of SAP for years, and as part of our upgrade to S/4HANA, PowerVM plays a critical role in ensuring smooth migration and optimized resource allocation. PowerVM also gives us the ability to move workloads between systems with minimal or no downtime (Live Partition Mobility - LPM), which supports our high availability goals and business continuity. The solution is used in our production data center and is central to our server virtualization and modernization strategy. The product is mainly used in our data center for running core enterprise applications, and it plays a key role in our server virtualization and consolidation strategy. ### 2. IBM Power VM **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravinder H. | AIX Lead , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 18, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** IBM Power VM Provide the advanced virtualisation feature to save the cost of project and data centre infrastructure. IBM Power VM is easy to implement in IBM power servers . IBM Power VM provide a highly secure and scalable environment. Easy to virtualise the physical ethernet and Storage HBA cards. It provides the CPU and Memory pool feature, which helps maintain the server performance. Easily we can add and move the resource like CPU/Memory between the virtual LPARs. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** IBM Power VM is costly in the market compared to other VMs. I did not find any issue during work on IBM Power VM. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using the IBM Power VM in our virtual environments. We have saved the projects cost and reduced the number of physical servers. We can now manage the server performance issue as we can add/move the resources into LPARswheneverr we require. Online we can increase the capacity of physical servers if required. ### 3. IBM Power VM Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aditya S. | Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** 1. POWER VM is the best VMs in the market right now. It is robust, highly scalable, reliability is very high and on top of that availability is also very. It is better than most players present in the market right now **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Maintenance activities sometimes take time. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our enterprise system such as ERP, CRM and other bolt-on applications is running on POWER VM .It is highly robust ### 4. IBM Power VM Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** The possibility of using a native solution with support directly from IBM to virtualize our customer loads. IBM Power is the preferred solution for bankin organizations in the caribbean and Power VM helps reducing costs. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Typically this virtualization solution is considerably more expensive than other competitors such as VMWare, is worth to use based on performance, reliability, and security of the computing platform. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** I would suggest to use recurrently PowerVP, is a great tool and provides visibility of current virtualized workloads. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** They are solving the problem of buying and managing a significant amount of Physically IBM Power servers directly. Also, many clients feel comfortable as they have support to use it together with migration projects to newer AIX OS options. ### 5. I work as Head of Systems Unit in Byblos bank, I have been working with IBM AIX since 2002. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** performance, stability and security, you will get the most when using IBM PowerVM. In addition to the CPU pooling option which gives you the flexibility to combine the cores and to save a lot of money when it comes to software licenses. Also the online / dynamic resources allocation can save you when you face unexpected performance issues and finally it increases your availability and Business recovery when combined with IBM LPM and SRR. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** It is not user friendly as other hypervisors VMware and Hyper-V also it lacks to VM or LPAR replication to DR sites. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** When it comes to critical / core businesses it is always recommend to use IBM Power VM for better security, flexibility, performance and availability **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** solving performance issues by dynamically assigning more resources when doing performance tests, running in DR or during EOM and other unexpected performance pick problem. Saving a lot of money when using CPU pooling to combine many workloads using the same applications software in the same pool especially in test and Dev environments. using Dev and test resources to increase the resources allocations to DR workloads when running in Disaster recovery. Business continuity in case of disaster. ### 6. System Administrator **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 14, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Its very good hardware with respect to its performance. It have very outstanding performance and its stability is very excellent. We are very satisfied by using this IBM Power VM. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Nothing. Its really a good hardware. I dont have bad experience. I am using this and my all of performance issue resolved which we were facing previously. Power IBM VM is best one available in the market. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** I would like to recommend to all please use this one time hope your all issues will be addressed. We have major challenge about the system performance when there are more the 10K users logged in to use core banking software. But Now after using this Power IBM VM performance issue resolved. Further its really best and secure as per security point of view now a days. I will give 4/4 Rating to Power IBM VM. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have major challenge about the system performance when there are more the 10K users logged in to use core banking software. But Now after using this Power IBM VM performance issue resolved. Further its really best and secure as per security point of view now a days. ### 7. Power Processor Power VM **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Import and Export | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 14, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** The best thing I like about IBM Power VM is the ability to fully manage and operate the system using command prompt. this makes repeatable processes easy. Stability and reliability is world class. Resources are easily moveable from one partition to the other. Processor can be added and removed, Memory can also be added and removed as required. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** The fact that IBM Power VC works only on a power processor. I can only try to imagine a world where I can install a version of PowerVC on an intel machine. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** Be careful when working with Power VC. Decide where Partition Management is going to be from. :- HMC or PowerVC. Do not manage a partition with powervc, and manage from the HMC at the same time. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Virtualizing the power server. Being able to share resources in a granular manner. Multiple partitions are created for Training and development, R and D Purposes ### 8. Stable, easier and visibility and control over the hardware is good. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bright A. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** I like the flexibility of managing the hardware resources such as RAM and CPU and network and storage. We had a requirement to increase storage and it has been added without downtime which is awesome. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** There is nothing like dislike, it would be great we have more features like real time and historical performance monitoring in the system, more visibility on the communication. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using OLTP application which require more IO and CPU power. Power VM provide flexibility to add more CPU memory on fly. ### 9. Why power VM **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rami B. | Technical Support Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** To have any type of solution in workload and virtualization using IBM powerVM technology. Uptime and keeping performance linear even when workload is high. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Technology that IBM forgot years ago are still not available in other virtualization platform and only IBM users knows that and that is a bad for IBM marketing **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** If you are an enterprise organization and downtime means loosing money than AIX with powerVM can solve most of your challenges Especially if you need dB performance and Java applications **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Any kind of virtualization is possible and automating workloads which solves day by day challenges. ### 10. I have experiance in POWER VM its relaible for application performace and secure data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fayyaz k. | Platform Services Leader - PowerVM-AIX-Linux-IBMi - IBM Storages, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** easy and interesting to work with power vm **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** i don't think so any thing i dislike in POWER VM **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** highly recommended this power full and reliable virtualization platform **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** application and data performance increased ### 11. PowerVM is very powerful virtualization. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sanad Z. | IBM Infrastructure Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** The stability and features that I can work with especially when using HMC **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** The is nothing to disklike when we are talking about PowerVM it is stable with many many features **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** If you are looking to reduce the number of your software license consider switching to IBM PowerVM. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly helping customers with their core banking application. ### 12. PowerVM Decision Making **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dinesh G. | Lead Digital Cloud Architect - Hybrid Cloud, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** The best I've seen in PowerVM are micro-portioning, LPM, Single Root I/O, Active Memory Sharing, NPIV. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** No integration with other platform rather IBM Power Series and limited community support. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** Based on client's digital strategy plan. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** To support other x86 platform. ### 13. IBM POWER VM made for core application **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ayaz A. | Team Lead Technical IBM & Huawei, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** for the performance and core banking sectors **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** IBM POWER VM is very expense for low budget customer **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** it is outclass product for performance **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** first benefits of IBM Service and fast issue solving ### 14. It is easy than VMware, but I think it can be more user-friendly **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 19, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** The managing of server resources is the most helpful in IBM Power VM **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** The least helpful in my opinion is that there are no many repositories like in another unix family **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are virtuallizing our physical old servers. Our card system is on power servers. We have bad experience with SUN servers, so we decide to use only IBM Power servers in our critical information systems. ### 15. Easy to interact **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Consolidation of multiple workloads, efficiency **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Hard to say, maybe more easier to recieve support and feedback when requiered, and also that doesnt support win os. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** PowerVM is directly incorporated into the Power Systems platform and brings with it the platform's integrated security, characteristics that go a long way in making PowerVM worth serious consideration for enterprise workloads. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** remote restarts on LPARs, suspend and resume LPAR operations, and migrate active or inactive LPARs from one system to another ### 16. IBM PowerVM the best server virtualization tool for IBM Systems **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 14, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Single tool to virtualize across workloads and easy to use and secure **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** It is chargeable to customer which might be a downside but it is definitely worth the investment of you have to save long term **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** A great tool to consider for virtualization if you are a IBM systems shop . I have already articulated the benefits **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We achieve scale out and scale up done easily and automate the virtualization ### 17. Poweful and Secure **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** I liked the capability of dynamically distributing resources across all systems. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** I think the VIO setup can be simplified or at last the update process of it feels like a very risky procedure. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Performance issues. PowerVM cpu time allocation was amazing helping us solve several issues with on demand usage. ### 18. It's no doubt one of the most powerful Virtualization techniques **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** It's stability is something anyone will like **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Nothing much but you need end to end knowledge to implement this and also GUI is not that useful **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a Virtualization suite and you can do almost everything virtual. Dynamic CPU, Memory. Virtual IO are the best features. ### 19. PowerVM is the most efficient resource computing hypervisor on the market. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Its ability to virtualize from the chip and up. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Little bit confusing with the enhanced hmc, creation of virtual repository for installing vm little bit complicated, also hmc interface should be more intuitive. **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** Best hypervisor **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** More powerfull computing power to use, realibility. ### 20. Ibm virtualization is very fast and reliable resource to use for big data and for secure data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** CH. M. | Team Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Most reliable and scalable cloud environment **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Expensive and difficult and no guide to deployment **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Big data secure data good resources backup replication ### 21. Powerful Virtulization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 30, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** There is power system for production of retail, banking. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** It was hard to configure for new users, we should have some experience to use power system. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** It run smoothly with almost database with AIX/Redhat OS ### 22. Power VM is most important key of IBM virtualization . **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** VIOS, VIOS and VIOC manage all things in proper way . **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Nothing to dislike in may way . Everyone (AIX ADMINISTRATOR) like POWER VM **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** yes **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** You can created one to many port and manage virtualization ### 23. IBM power VM is very stable **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** Stability is the key and that's the main advantage. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Manageability. Managing IBM power VM is not very easy but can be managed by experienced engineers **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Specialy to get the required uptime for our financial application services. ### 24. Power VM experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** -+Power VM memory sharing would be one of the best features I have ever seen on a virtual deployment, that would allow you to easily boots the memory usage on the deployed machines. -+seamless no downtime with the maintenance windows they have a feature to even load with other machines ++Multiple tutorial for the services and improvement on the deployments. ++Impressive security and safeguard of the information former external threats. **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** ++The features are some distributed on paid services that sometime require a lot of investment to allow it to work on the best possible scenario(HA, scalability, resources for deployment). **Recommendations to others considering IBM Power VM:** This would represent a superior virtualization solutions for AIX, Linux and IBM i clients, other services would very likely be supported however, it up to you if this suit you. Take into account that the services of the PowerVM is a combination of hardware, firmware, and software that provides CPU, network, and disk virtualization, this might have its's on limitations and would need further check on this according your requirements. These are the main virtualization technologies: POWER7, POWER6, and POWER5 hardware, POWER Hypervisor and Virtual I/O Server **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** ++New virtual domains, allows you improve on the VM domains that you have, also work wonders with Linux or Windows. ++Storage and speed on the deployments are quite fast to other options such as VMware. ### 25. Use Cases and Deployment Scope **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Syed R. | Assistant General Manager, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** real-time and historical performance reporting **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Did not find any single problem. Expecting more features in future. **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** PowerVM is well suited for virtual machines that need access to high performance and reliability. ### 26. Does the best job of allocating cores **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rafia R. | Dental Assistant, Cosmetics, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM Power VM?** allows one to configure VMs to optimum software licensing needs **What do you dislike about IBM Power VM?** Did not find any problem. Expecting more features in future **What problems is IBM Power VM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provides insight to specific VM performance and utilization ## IBM Power VM Discussions - [What is IBM Power VM used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-ibm-power-vm-used-for) - [What is the best way to leverage IBM PowerVM to run the application that requires x86 infrastructure?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/34679-what-is-the-best-way-to-leverage-ibm-powervm-to-run-the-application-that-requires-x86-infrastructure) - 1 upvote - [View IBM Power VM pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-power-vm/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-23+19%3A22%3A41+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=6efd4d32-19c4-4fdb-8f90-77e4d991bee8&secure%5Btoken%5D=2b65a5b3f2ea8061f07f6251deaaae6cd5af27114d2a54a022d1f8b78f89e539&format=llm_user) ## IBM Power VM Features **Performance** - Scalability - Portability - Data Recovery **Functionality** - OS Integration - Resource Saving - Performance Management - Security **Agentic AI - Server Virtualization** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making ## Top IBM Power VM Alternatives - [VMware vSphere](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsphere/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (745 reviews) - [Azure Virtual Machines](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-virtual-machines/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (376 reviews) - [Google Compute Engine](https://www.g2.com/products/google-compute-engine/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (875 reviews)