PowerVM, formerly known as Advanced Power Virtualization (APV), is a chargeable feature of IBM POWER5, POWER6 and POWER7 servers and is required for support of micro-partitions and other advanced features. Support is provided for IBM i, AIX and Linux.
IBM PowerVM has the following components:
A "VET" code, which activates firmware required to support resource sharing and other features.Installation media for the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), which is a service partition providing sharing services for disk and network adapters.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 is a co-requisite for use of this feature.IBM PowerVM comes in three editions.
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.No support for Multiple Shared Processor Pools.Withdrawn from marketing August 1, 2014. (source)This is primarily intended for "sandbox" environments
IBM PowerVM Standard
Supported on all POWER5, POWER6 and POWER7 systems.Unrestricted use of partitioning - 10× LPARs per core (20× LPARs for Power7+ servers) (up to a maximum of 1,000 per system).Multiple Shared Processor Pools (on POWER6 and POWER7 systems only).This is the most common edition in use on production systems.
Supported on POWER6 and POWER7 systems only.As PowerVM Standard with the addition of Live Partition Mobility (which allows running virtual machines to migrate to another system) and Active Memory Sharing (which intelligently reallocates physical memory between multiple running virtual machines).Overview of Advanced POWER VirtualizationIBM Redbooks | PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p: Introduction and ConfigurationIBM Redbooks | PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p: Managing and MonitoringVirtual I/O Server Commands Reference