Driving Efficiency with Virtualization: A Case Study of AIX & RHEL on IBM POWER Architecture using QEMU

Introduction

A renowned security product company wanted to test and certify their products on IBM power architecture.

Challenges

Solution

Results

The security product company identifies the following challenges:

Cost Constraints: Security company has budget constraints and cannot invest on IBM Power PC.

Faster deployment of Testing Environment: Cloning and taking a snapshot in the existing environment is not possible.

To address these challenges, Gigahertz Consultants Private Limited (GCPL) provided the below solution to the security product company:

Implementation: Using physical system with Ubuntu 22, GCPL installed QEMU 8.0 to emulate the IBM Power Architecture.

Testing and Validation: GCPL conducted testing and validation to ensure compatibility between AIX, RHEL on QEMU (IBM Power Architecture). They implemented a testing process to identify the compatibility issues related to OS, networking & binaries and address them promptly.

Monitoring: GCPL implemented the monitoring solution (NagiOS) to monitor the uptime and performance utilization.

Enhanced Flexibility: Virtualizing AIX and RHEL workloads on IBM POWER architecture using QEMU provided to the security company with increased flexibility in resource allocation and management for development and testing environment.

Conclusion

Through the strategic adoption of virtualization technology, the security product company successfully modernized its IT infrastructure, realizing significant benefits in terms of flexibility and cost savings. Despite the initial challenges encountered, the implemented solution enabled seamless integration of AIX and RHEL workloads on IBM POWER architecture using QEMU.