System i to get VMware virtualization

Timothy Prickett Morgan has an interesting story at IT Jungle about how IBM is working on developing VMware server virtualization support on the System i.

Morgan gets the information from IBM’s Redbooks Residency program, which allows developers anywhere to come together and write manuals on future IBM technologies. In this case, IBM indicates that afuture release of i5/OS will support VMotion from VMware on the System i.

Does that mean that VMware will supplant logical partitions as the virtualization standard on the System i? Morgan thinks not. VMotion — which is just one of the features of the VMware Infrastructure 3 software — allows for a so-called “hot migration.” Using VMotion, users can migrate one virtual machine to another virtual machine that sits on a separate physical server.

Morgan hypothesizes that the VMotion support on the System i will mainly be used for disaster recovery and backup purposes with connected System x servers. That remains to be seen, but it is interesting that IBM is opening up to supporting VMware virtualization on Power-based hardware.