There was plenty of talk earlier this year that a server blade running i5/OS might be ready by the end of this year, but in conversations I had this week from IBM’s Power systems group, that’s not going to happen.

Scott Handy, a marketing VP in the group, said i5/OS will be available on the Power6 blade in the first half of next year, presumably around the same time Power6 System i rack servers will be ready as well. He told me that “i5/OS isn’t ready yet.”

There’s another thing. A feature of the Power6 chip is Live Partition Mobility, which allows users to move an entire hard partition from one physical server to another without any downtime. Right now it’s available on AIX and Linux. Obviously it’s not available on i5/OS yet because there isn’t a Power6-based server running i5/OS yet, but Handy wouldn’t commit to me about whether it would be available for i5/OS, only saying that IBM is “working on it.”

IBM is working on a draft redbook about logical partitioning on System i and p. Since Big Blue has been pushing the two platforms as good locations for server consolidation projects (especially the System p), knowing LPARs like the back of your hand is a good first step.