Welcome to nova-dpm’s documentation!

On IBM z Systems and IBM LinuxOne machines, certain workloads run better in a partition of the firmware-based PR/SM (Processor Resource/System Manager) hypervisor, than in a virtual machine of a software hypervisor such as KVM or z/VM.

This project provides a Nova virtualization driver for the PR/SM hypervisor of IBM z Systems and IBM LinuxOne machines that are in the DPM (Dynamic Partition Manager) administrative mode.

The DPM mode enables dynamic capabilities of the firmware-based PR/SM hypervisor that are usually known from software-based hypervisors, such as creation, deletion and modification of partitions (i.e. virtual machines) and virtual devices within these partitions, and dynamic assignment of these virtual devices to physical I/O adapters.

The z/VM and KVM hypervisors on z Systems and LinuxONE machines are supported by separate Nova virtualization drivers: