We are excited to highlight some new PowerVM (Hypervisor and VIOS) and HMC features that are available with the newly announced Power11 servers. 

Automated Platform Update

Execute Power Platform updates with minimal manual intervention to streamline operations and reduce the risk of human error. Our advanced one-touch update solution enables seamless platform updates, supporting both evacuation-and-return or in-place update strategies, while your business applications continue running, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing downtime.

Automated Log collection

Reduce problem resolution time with the ability to collect platform logs—including System Firmware, Hypervisor, HMC, and VIOS—from a single, unified interface. This functionality enables you to collect/upload diagnostic logs from a single pane of glass, streamlining issue triage and resolution.

Ability to create a case and upload logs to the case from HMC.

Resource Groups

Resource Groups is a new firmware concept that sub-divides a server into different compute groups to provide better isolation between groups of partitions than can be provided with a hardware only solution.  Use cases for Resource Groups include:

-         Resource consolidation from multiple servers to a single Power11 server

-         Consolidation across multiple lines of business

-         Isolation of production workloads from test or development workloads

-         Application performance improvements by grouping workload tiers into Resource Groups

PowerVM Security updates

Power11 adds new security feature such as secure boot and LPM that utilize quantum safe cryptography. There are also security updates that increase the maximum Platform Key Store (PKS) and provide Platform keystore key wrapping.

Power Mode setting and scheduled operations

Provides users with the ability to change the system’s Power Mode and schedule power mode transitions based on system usage patterns. Users can also view real-time CPU usage and associated power modes through the Environmental Dashboard.

Partition Level Energy Monitoring

Enable real-time monitoring and detailed reporting of energy consumption and carbon emissions at the virtual machine (VM) and partition level for greater visibility and sustainability insights.

Performance Improvements when powering on Power11 servers

Power 11 servers may see Platform boot times decreased by 15-20% (Service Processor standby to Firmware standby) compared to previous Power servers.  Actual improvements depend on configuration; enhancements were focused on the high-end and mid-range servers.

Minimum Affinity Scoring

For some time, Power servers have supported an affinity score which is a relative score (0-100) representing how well resources (processor cores and memory) are assigned with respect to affinity.  With the introduction of Power11, two new attributes have been added to the partition scoring; a minimum desired affinity score and an action to the taken at boot or for Live Partition Mobility (LPM) when the current affinity score is less than the minimum specified score.  The actions supported are to ignore the low score, warn at boot/LPM or fail at boot/LPM.

VIOS Enhancements

The viosupgrade tool has been enhanced with several key improvements:

·        The NIM based viosupgrade tool now supports most of the options available in the standalone version.

·        It also been extended to support a wider range of security configurations including user accounts and groups, audit sub system trusted execution policies, IPsec filters and tunnel, LDAP clients etc ..

Power11 Hardware Changes

Maximum Cores – Power10 supported a maximum of 240 cores, but Power11 now supports a maximum of 256 cores.

Spare Cores - RAS feature available on certain models and configurations. Allows for increased uptime by significantly reducing the need for a processor module replacement in the rare event of a processor core failure.

LLDP and MFA support for eBMC.

Deprecated / Changed functions

In previous generations of Power servers, the affinity_group_id setting was used not only to establish a priority for resource assignment at server power on and for Dynamic Platform Optimizer (optmem HMC command) but the affinity_group_id setting also was a hint to group partitions into the same NUMA domains (chips, DCM and CEC drawers).  Since the newly released Resource Group feature provides better control over partition grouping, the affinity_group_id setting will no longer group partitions; the setting will only be used to prioritize the resource assignments.

Summary

This was a brief introduction to just some of the new features that are available from the PowerVM team.  IBM will be releasing new blogs over the coming weeks to provide details and examples of how you can best leverage these new features in your environments.

For additional information on the new PowerVM, HMC / vHMC, PowerVC, and Cloud Management Console (CMC) capabilities being delivered in July 2025, see the Platform Enhancements announce letter here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/announcements/AD25-0068

Also see the Press Release for much more Power 11 information: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-07-08-ibm-power11-raises-the-bar-for-enterprise-it

Contacting the PowerVM Team

Have questions for the PowerVM team or want to learn more?  Follow our discussion group on LinkedIn IBM PowerVM or IBM Community Discussions