According to the IBM i Marketplace Survey, nearly half of businesses rank High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) among their top IT concerns. A key component of this is minimizing downtime during planned server maintenance, whether upgrading to the latest IBM Power hardware, or applying disruptive critical platform firmware and VIOS updates. With cybersecurity as the top IT concern, staying up to date on both platform firmware and VIOS software is more important than ever before.
What Is Live Partition Mobility (LPM)?
IBM Power offers a powerful solution called Live Partition Mobility or LPM. This technology allows you to move a running IBM Power Logical Partition (LPAR) from one physical server to another, without interrupting applications or users. In most cases, the transition is seamless and invisible to end users.
The key to LPM is virtualization. When all hardware assigned to a partition is virtualized, it enables the underlying physical infrastructure to change without impacting the software. As a long-standing IBM partner, Fortra supports Live Partition Mobility across our core strategic solutions for IBM Power and our software is designed to work seamlessly with it. Live Partition Mobility is often combined with other HA/DR solutions like PowerHA and Robot HA to provide protection from additional types of outages.
LPM in the Cloud
Live Partition Mobility isn’t just for on-premise environments. Many cloud providers use LPM behind the scenes to deliver high availability, seamless hardware maintenance, and dynamic resource management. Whether you’re running IBM Power workloads on-premise, in a private cloud, or through a managed service provider, LPM is a technology that enables flexibility and improved uptime.
Licensing Made Easy
We understand that software licensing can be a concern when moving workloads between systems. Many software packages are tied to physical hardware identifiers like serial numbers or partition IDs. That is why we’ve built flexibility into our licensing model, including:
Multiple License Key Support: The most recent versions of Fortra's strategic IBM Power products support entering multiple license keys, streamlining software mobility across physical systems or partitions without manual intervention. The ability to enter multiple license keys in Fortra products is designed to enhance operational flexibility in environments leveraging technologies such as LPM, and HA/DR solutions such as PowerHA SystemMirror for i or Robot HA.
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- Virtual Serial Number (VSN) Compatibility: IBM introduced a technology called Virtual Serial Numbers to simplify licensing in virtualized environments, both on-premises or in the cloud. A VSN is globally unique, meaning no two LPARs in the world share the same VSN. When that LPAR moves using technologies like Live Partition Mobility, the VSN moves with it. Our solutions fully support VSN-based licensing, with the ability to have license keys tied solely to the VSN and not to the partition ID. This approach simplifies license management and requires no manual intervention when moving the partition across physical systems.
- Strategic License Agreements: For larger organizations, we offer Strategic Agreements that provide even greater flexibility. This included licenses that support processor sharing technologies including Power Enterprise Pools (PEP) 1.0 and 2.0. These agreements are designed to support dynamic environments and evolving infrastructure needs.
Leverage Fortra's Licensing Flexibility
Whether you’re planning a hardware refresh, implementing HA/DR, or simply wanting to reduce downtime utilizing technologies like LPM, we’re here to help. Contact us today to explore which flexible licensing options are right for your environment.
