Interesting redbook released on ‘PowerVM’. This is the first I’ve heard of it, must be some marketing tactics. I hate marketing. =]

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247590.html

‘PowerVM™ is a combination of hardware and software that supports and manages the virtual environment s on POWER5™ , POWER5+™ and POWER6™ systems. It can help simplify and optimize your IT infrastructure.’

Chapter 1. Overview
Part 1. PowerVM virtualization management
Chapter 2. Virtual storage management
Chapter 3. Virtual network management
Chapter 4. Virtual I/O Server security
Chapter 5. Virtual I/O Server maintenance
Chapter 6. Dynamic operations
Chapter 7. PowerVM Live Partition Mobility
Chapter 8. System Planning Tool
Chapter 9. Automated management
Chapter 10. High level management
Part 2. PowerVM virtualization monitoring
Chapter 11. Monitoring global system resources allocations
Chapter 12. Monitoring commands on the Virtual I/O Server
Chapter 13. CPU monitoring
Chapter 14. Memory monitoring
Chapter 15. Virtual storage monitoring
Chapter 16. Virtual network monitoring
Chapter 17. AIX performance workbench
Chapter 18. Linux monitoring and useful third party tools
Chapter 19. Virtual I/O Server integration to IBM Tivoli
Appendix A. mkldap manual page
Appendix B. Example script for disc recovery on the AIX virtual client

Some great new features with this release. One of the major issues I have when creating new LPARs is the fact that we can’t get the WWNs from HBAs up front for the storage team before the LPARs are loaded with AIX. If we’re lucky and do an entire system inventory before going live, we can sorta guess as to what the WWN would be. I’m currently installing the new code, so I cannot confirm if this is actually useful at this point or not, but I’m hoping for the best.

From the readme

*Provides HMC users more detailed view of slot contents including child devices.
*Allows administrators to view Ethernet MAC addresses and FibreChannel WWN’s from the HMC before partitions are configured
*Ability to create multiple virtual processor pools, providing easier license management by capping the number of processor cycles that can be consumed by a group of uncapped logical partitions.
*Partition mobility - a new HMC function, on systems that are capable to use this function, that enables moving a partition from one managed system to another. The active partition mobility function provides the HMC administrator the ability to non-disruptively move a running partition, with its operating system and applications, profiles, and virtualized resources, across two capable and compatible servers that are under the control of the same HMC. The inactive partition mobility function provides the ability to move an inactive, powered-off partition, with its profiles and virtualized resources, across two servers that are under the control of the same HMC.

I believe the ability to create other virtual processor pools was for power6 only, since most of that is hypervisor based. This will also be very useful due to licensing issues that I come across here and there. There’s also a huge list of fixes for v7 UI in general, probably still bugs from going from Java Webstart  to the browser based interface.

I’m definitely looking forward to this installation to complete!

Also just to mention, there is fix MH01062 for 3.2.0 out as well.
This is available on the download page.

Pretty useful link for VIOS commands

Virtual I/O Server Commands Reference