IBM PowerVM is a virtualization solution from IBM especially for power systems. It consists of a combination of special hardware and software. The main components of IBM PowerVM are as follows:

Special POWER hardware with firmware (POWER hypervisor), which enables the sharing of resources and other features.

The virtual I/O server, as a special service partition, which enables the sharing of disk and network resources. For increased redundancy, several virtual I/O servers can be configured on one POWER system.

The guest systems created by PowerVM are often referred to as LPARs (Logical PARtition). Recently, however, the term VM (virtual machine) has also been used frequently here. We have retained the term LPAR instead of VM throughout this document. AIX, IBM i and Linux can be used as guest operating systems, whereby Linux is then a POWER-based Linux.