Comment # 34 on bug 1202138 from Oliver Kurz

(In reply to Michal Suchanek from comment #33)
> If you want to use KVM on Power it's more likely to work on POWER9. It uses
> the new KVM code that upstream tests and actively develops.
> 
> Nonetheless, the virtualization team does not support it, and it may be
> broken from time to time, and take some time until fixed. Better chances
> than POWR8, though.

thank you. That is helpful information.

> For PowerVM both HMC and Novalink is scriptable so it's very much possible
> to create VMs on the fly but it requires platform-specific implementation.
> 
> For storage and snapshots FC storage and iSCSI storage is supported by
> PowerVM making it possible to move the save/restore/... functionality
> outside of the test machine. Either requires extra hardware, the default
> 4x1Gbit NIC is not great for iSCSI, and FC is not available on most
> machines.

Yes. That's right. All those ideas are good but platform-specific so an
expensive investment if we would continue with that.

> It's also possible to use some solution that saves/restores the
> system over network in a platform-independent way, and it may be of use for
> testing baremetal as well if it ever gets implemented.

do you mean something like calling "dd" piped to "netcat" from a live-system?
Because that's what I was commonly using to deploy systems easily including
Microsoft Windows XP :D

> Also iSCSI can be used on most hardware.

> Management tools that make creating LPARs easier do exist but we did not
> make use of any so far, mostly because Orthos and openQA do the same thing
> in a crosss-platform way. It is failing on Power, though.

> And s390 KVM is likely not making full use of the hardware capabilities, either.

Well, it's working fine for years and supports saving/loading VM images which
is the important factor.