Tame the Complexities of Reporting Performance for IBM/AIX Partitioned Power5 Systems

When IBM introduced partitioning for POWER5 systems running AIX in 2004, they had a lot of experience with this virtualization technology - similar technologies were employed for mainframe systems since 1987. But analysts responsible for Distributed Systems were not so lucky (unless they happened to have mainframe performance experience) - this was entirely new territory in which to manage performance. No longer could one metric, CPU utilization, possibly cover the varied situations that required expert interpretation. AIX partitioning is a very powerful virtualization strategy that allows precise management of diverse workloads, each having its own operating system image.