IBM PowerVM Active Memory Sharing: An Overview

IBM PowerVM™ provides industrial-strength virtualization for Power Systems™ servers running AIX®, IBM i, and Linux® operating systems. PowerVM now features Active Memory Sharing, the technology that allows you to intelligently exchange memory between running partitions for increased optimization of physical memory resources. Active Memory Sharing enables the sharing of a pool of physical memory among logical partitions (LPARs) on a single server, helping to increase memory utilization and drive down system costs.

This paper provides a high-level overview of Active Memory Sharing including an overview of its capabilities, a description of its benefits, and examples of good candidate workloads as well as usage considerations.