PowerVM, formerly known as Advanced Power Virtualization (APV), is a chargeable feature of IBM POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8, POWER9 and Power10 servers and is required for support of micro-partitions and other advanced features. Support is provided for IBM i, AIX and Linux.

Description

IBM PowerVM has the following components: Prior to its withdrawal from marketing in 2011, PowerVM also came with installation media for Lx86, x86 binary translation software, which allows Linux applications compiled for the Intel x86 platform to run in POWER-emulation mode. A supported Linux distribution was a co-requisite for use of this feature. IBM PowerVM comes in two editions: Prior to its withdrawal from marketing in August 1, 2014, a third edition, IBM PowerVM Express, was also available. Intended primarily for "sandbox" environments, it was only supported on "Express" servers (e.g. Power 710/730, 720/740, 750 and Power Blades), limited to three partitions (one of which must be a VIOS partition), and with no support for Multiple Shared Processor Pools.