1. Introduction

Enterprises continue to look for ways to overcome new and existing challenges. Whether driving to increase productivity, developing new strategies, looking for ways to innovate, or striving to create more flexibility and efficiency in their IT infrastructure, businesses require technology that supports their on demand initiatives. Building on IBM’s mainframe leadership and strong heritage of virtualization across IBM systems, IBM Virtualization Engine™ enriches these industry-leading and innovative competencies across the entire IBM and Total Storage portfolio. It helps to further simplify and optimize the management of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure. This chapter introduces the basic concepts of IBM’s On-Demand Infrastructure and IBM Virtualization Engine, and how the IBM p5 systems incorporate these technologies.

The remainder of this publication focuses on explaining the latest p5 virtualization technologies and walking you through various configurations you may find useful to better your understanding.